She has a full day of work ahead and a forty-five minute commute. Her three children will be at school all day, after which two will have music lessons and one hockey practice. Her husband is out of town on business all week. She posts a picture of her alarm clock: 5:45 AM, and the […]
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Silence, maybe. Space to write. A quiet column of time in which to give audience to all that’s in one’s head. That might be what a writer wants. But that’s not always true. Having made room for these things precisely, a writer can find that they are absolutely not what she wants. She can find […]
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Putting a book together is interesting and exhilarating. It is sufficiently difficult and complex that it engages all your intelligence. It is life at its most free. I started in earnest on a new book today. It wasn’t one I’ve been meaning to write. For some time now, the list of what I’ve been meaning […]
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Above the sofa in my living room is a painting that once belonged to my grandfather. A picture of the sea: everywhere water. Peaks and troughs fill more than two-thirds of the frame, all done in deep greenish blues with paler blues for foam and spray. Whitecaps curl and spread on a crest far off […]
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Up North, they make fun of the way Southerners handle the snow. They say we can’t handle it–which definitely seems true. Our whole world shuts down: this is our third morning and I haven’t seen a soul outdoors yet today because it’s 8 degrees, because everything froze again last night and still is frozen, because […]
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From earliest memory, my fascination at Christmas has always been with the nativity–not with Santa Claus. Certainly, as a child I was interested in him. Notions of his sleigh and reindeer, of a dwelling (a village, even) in the snowy reaches of the North Pole, the idea that he bounded through the sky and visited […]
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I was in the mall on a recent Friday morning, a quick stop between the post office and the gym, because sometimes my life is like this. Except for the mall part. (I actually hate going to the mall, due to its uncanny propensity to awaken desires for things I don’t have and didn’t even […]
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He is before all things You can’t know–when waking at the gray cat’s paw to a dark sky–how the light will come through the trees at noon. Other things come first: the sliced turkey laid just so on the bread, carrots and cherry tomatoes, the mandarin, the note on the napkin. Coffee. He is before […]
Read moreToday I hoped to accomplish a small handful of things which included, but was not limited to all the laundry walking the dog making soup for dinner writing a blog post I think anyone would agree this is a very small handful of things. It is not even a real handful, I think– which also […]
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I always tell my pregnant friends to make plans on their due-dates. “Make sure you have something to do,” I say, because most babies aren’t born on their due dates, and by the time one is at the end of her pregnancy, a due date can feel like a bull’s eye on the calendar, fixed […]
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