From the Willow Room in the Prince Conference Center at Calvin College, one can see willow trees. They stand at some distance from the building, at least one hundred yards away, and during the lecture on self-editing a manuscript, I watched these trees. They were huge. Their branches were many. And all of these branches–those […]
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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 […]
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It has always been the field at the bottom of our neighborhood, the backyard of the community pool. Earliest memory finds us there with baby William at his first Easter, eight months old and unable to walk and sitting in the sand that is the volleyball court. We were late for the egg hunt, but […]
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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 […]
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I drove the girls to school on Thursday, a late-summer, light-filled morning. It was just the third week of school, day thirteen if we’re keeping count, which might not be a good idea. The conversation en route was cheerful. Chatter about driver’s ed, gladness that it was already Thursday, and the painted parking […]
Read moreLike everyone else, I was surprised and dismayed to hear Monday’s news: the bombs detonating, the screams and smoke, the aftermath. Amputations, shrapnel and surgeries because you went to see them cross the finish line. Three of them dead, all of them somebody’s child. After three days worth of radio news, I was nonetheless surprised […]
Read moreThe ears wake first, opening to the songs of birds: titmouse, cardinal, the jay’s cry. They are close to the house and they are in the woods; they are streets and blocks and arm’s reach away. In the cedar, in the dogwood, the beech. It’s time to feed, maybe time to nest. Morning is the birds’ world first. Then the […]
Read moreMy children went back to school yesterday. First day of school in the new year, but they are still wrapping up the first semester. The trees are bare still; the lawn still only two-thirds raked from the fall of leaves and pine needles. The kitchen window still wants washing, and only yesterday I scrubbed last year’s […]
Read moreI had forgotten completely this in the longing for winter—this winter now just past, this winter that wasn’t. Thirty degrees today and sixty tomorrow: I had wished for just one solid week of winter. I worked my favorite puzzle on the coffee table again, the one with the picture covered in snow, the one that […]
Read moreHow surprisingly easy it was to ignore him! What I was letting rip, in fact, was my willingness to look foolish, in his eyes and in my own. Having chosen this foolishness, I was a free being. How could the world ever stop me, how could I betray myself, if I was not afraid? It […]
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