Tweet I know this happiness is provisional: the looming presences – great suffering, great fear – withdraw only into peripheral vision: but ineluctable this shimmering of wind in the blue leaves: this flood of stillness widening the lake of sky: this need to dance, this need to kneel: this mystery. – Denise Levertov, Of Being [...]
Tweet Occasionally I have an experience where several people, all known to me but unknown to each other, send me the same article, image, or piece of writing. That happened with this gorgeous piece: On Friendship – Pam’s words at The Kitchen Witch’s site brought me to my knees. I’ve written often about friendship, about [...]
Tweet Last weekend, Grace’s best friend from camp came to visit. This friend is the daughter of my best friend from camp. The sheer fact of this, and the way I kept seeing my friend’s face in her daughter’s, made me dizzy several times this weekend. Talk about vertigo: then, now, us, them, summer, the [...]
Tweet I couldn’t wait to read my friend Lauren Miller’s debut novel, Parallel. I was already wowed by what I knew of Lauren’s story, that she’d written the first draft of this book during her daughter’s infancy. Then, I read Parallel and found it an entirely engrossing, tremendously fun experience. Parallel is a compulsively readable [...]
Tweet Almost daily I wish desperately that I could freeze my children into in amber. I want to remember exactly who and how they are right now. Lately Whit is slaying me with adorableness and hilarity. There’s his under-his-breath proclamation that someone is a “tionary,” or his loud, from the back seat question while we [...]
Tweet We live in all we seek. The hidden shows up in too-plain sight. It lives captive on the face of the obvious – the people, events, and things of the day – to which we as sophisticated children have long since become oblivious. What a hideout: Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface [...]
Tweet The older I get, and the more established in my own mothering patterns, the more I appreciate this woman. The one who taught me everything I need to know. The one whose middle name is the same as mine and as Grace’s. The one whose hair my sister and I unabashedly share (I remember [...]
Tweet Last weekend, in search of a picture of my mother and me, I leafed through our wedding albums for the first time in many years. We were married in the dark ages, which is to say the pre-digital photography era. This is one of my favorite pictures of all, because it reminds me of [...]
Tweet I couldn’t wait to read Courtney Sullivan’s new novel, The Engagements, which comes out June 12th. I was fortunate enough to read it recently (for disclosure, we share an agent, and I was given an advance copy. The views expressed here are absolutely my own). The Engagements opens in 1947, late at night, as Frances, an [...]
Tweet This picture, while it is of bedtime, is not specifically related to this post. I love it, though, because it demonstrates the kids sleeping on the floor when we visited our closest friends’ house this winter. This is a classic move from my family, to unroll a sleeping bag and crash, and I’m quite [...]
