It is finally summer. A few images of the last several days: Crazy gorgeous blue sky. I love the faint tracing of an airplane’s straight line juxtaposed with the puffy clouds. A reminder of all that is linear and all that is utterly non-linear. Grace on the camp bus. Continuing to try to let go. [...]
Sometimes it feels like what I do, all day long, is empty things. I empty the trash cans. I empty the dishwasher. I empty the basket of drycleaning into a bag to take it down the street. I empty the grocery bags into the fridge. I empty the childrens’ backpacks and I empty their lunchboxes. [...]
I always think of their shoulder blades as wings. Their wings, poking through their skin. And his little back has two freckles on it now, marks marring his white, skim-milk skin, my skin. Life beginning to make its mark on my child. The wings, though, are on my mind today. The wings. This past winter [...]
The wound is the place the light enters you. (Rumi) There’s no question in my mind what my essential wound is. It’s my sometimes-unbearable sensitivity to the passage of time, the immense difficulty I have accepting life’s basic impermanence. This manifests in a thousand ways big and small, which I’ve documented in excruciating detail here [...]
“How simple a thing it seems to me that to know ourselves as we are, we must know our mothers’ names.” Alice Walker I was on the phone recently with one of my best friends who was headed to a family wedding, and our conversation shifted to talking about her aunts, uncles, and cousins who [...]
“And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home.” – Wendell Berry Email this post
summer 2007 summer 2011 Still rocking the 3T seersucker suit. What happened to my baby? first day of Beginners, September 2009 last day of Kindergarten, June 2011 My baby is 6.5 He swims competently, though inelegantly. He reads short words. He loves Star Wars and Legos. He beats up on his sister. He makes me [...]
Yesterday was the summer solstice. I’ve written before of how important the solstice is to me. For all the years of my life my parents have hosted a party from 9 to midnight on the night of December 21st (awesome when it’s a Thursday, less awesome when it’s a Sunday). As midnight nears, a friend, [...]
I think I’ve run out of superlatives to describe Pam. I think I’ll just call her Pam the Great. Any more of my words would sully the gorgeousness, the sheer this-is-what-life-is-about and so WAKE UP and start living it power of this piece. So, without any more of my blathering: Pam. Thank you, thank you, [...]
This morning we worked in the yard. The “yard,” I should mention, is a little white-picket-fenced square in front of the house and a very small, mostly gravel, patch behind it. The kids washed dirty buckets and watering cans on the sidewalk while Matt pulled an overgrown ivy bush out of the front garden. I [...]
