The subject line of the email: “Stony Brook House.” The text was limited. Just a note from my dad, how pleased my parents were to come across the floor plan of the house my grandparents built in 1960. I think they lived there for a little more than a decade. By the time I was […]
Read moreThis morning, after days of cloudless blue, our sky was overcast. But it was warm again, and through open doors and windows, I could hear the blue-jays cry. I don’t hear the jays every day. At our feeder we get chickadees and finches, a nuthatch, and a small brown bird with a dart of white […]
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This blog post is a gift to my mother, whose birthday was April 21st. And in loving memory of my grandmother, Grace Everett, whose birthday was the 27th. The field guides were kept in the dining room. Not obtrusively on the kitchen table or counter, but just around the corner, accessible to a quick eye […]
Read moreAll of summer in a week and a half. That’s how it feels this morning, regardless of the cicadas’ buzz outside. Our summer lies dismantled on the living room floor: weary suitcases sag, waiting to spill our recent history, all disheveled, from their zippered seams. Again I am newly amazed at the miracle of modern […]
Read moreYes, this is a familiar feeling. I recognize it– and I don’t like it. I would imagine, too, that it’s almost universal: that sense of having a deadline, Something Due, and so everything else must wait, or take a back seat to it, anyway. Of course, deadlines are helpful. Even necessary. I have talked about […]
Read more“Do not hurry; do not rest.” — Goethe Here’s news– or is it?: I did not make my Thanksgiving deadline. There are lots of reasons for this, one of them being that, while Thanksgiving is on a Thursday, preparations and their busy-ness for it begin Well In Advance of that, which meant that I was doing nothing […]
Read moreHeedless Perhaps we love the shore because the debris here could not be ours no matter how hard our lives. Or because the long shelf of land continues on under the water so even here at the edge of the world the edge is uncertain. Perhaps we love that the water rises to uncertain levels […]
Read moreI’m wondering if anyone has done a sociological study on modern travel’s impact on people. Because surely this power we have– that of waking up in one place, city, state, even country, and, after a few quiet hours’ sitting, waiting, walking some, and claiming baggage– to find oneself in Another Place Entirely must have a […]
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Just some of the reasons.
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