I’ve written almost incessantly about my particular struggle to live in the present, about the way my near-constant preoccupation with both yesterday and tomorrow quite often entirely obscures today. On Saturday morning I felt a simultaneous impatience for fall to arrive and a desperate sorrow that summer was ending, and the moment perfectly captured all [...]
When I’m at home I almost always run the same loop. A creature of habit through and through, I am. The route takes me past the used bookstore that I used to go to as a kid with my sister and father, past a kid-friendly restaurant where I ate when both of my children were [...]
Matt has had a lovely assistant, M, for four years. I’ve spoken to her thousands of times (at least) on the phone, and I finally met her a couple of weeks ago at the firm’s summer event in Chatham. She was friendly and warm, her voice familiar even though her face was new. M died [...]
I am from a glass-fronted bookcase full of antique red-spined Baedeker guidebooks, a black and white photograph of my mother sailing a small dinghy at the age of eight, and the smell of pipe smoke. I am from a Victorian two-family home in North Cambridge with a turret, one bathroom, a back hallway that my [...]
I read Gail Caldwell’s Let’s Take the Long Way Home yesterday in one long, breathless gulp. The book is an elegant evocation of a true friendship between women, a heartbroken eulogy, and an unflinching exploration of what life looks like on the other side of an unimaginable loss. Written in Caldwell’s absolutely glorious prose, Let’s [...]
This has been a marvelous summer in many ways. I’ve really let myself sink into life at home with Grace and Whit, and I’ve been fortunate to do some special things with them that I hope they will always remember. They have each commented to me that they like having me around more, a comment [...]
I was at BlogHer this past weekend. Honestly, the weekend was kind of underwhelming, but I don’t want to go into that here. What is on my mind is the reaction that several of the people I was most excited to meet had to me. I’ve heard more than once since the weekend that people [...]
I love Kelly Rae Roberts’s post on being mothered, mothering, and becoming who we are meant to be. She writes beautifully about her own journey towards motherhood, the heartfelt progress of which I’ve enjoyed following. But the part that I’ve been thinking today is her reflection that ” i am mothered by so many people [...]
I am delighted to be posting at Tracey Clark’s remarkable I Am Enough collaborative today. I adore what Tracey’s project represents and am thrilled to participate. As anyone who visits this space knows, I write mostly about my efforts – sometimes frantic, sometimes futile, sometimes fruitful – to realize that my very own ordinary life [...]
The fabric of my life is woven through with departures. There are big ones, whose nubs are visible on the surface of my life, and smaller ones, the thread of which just glint when you turn the fabric this way and that. Like the samskaras that Dani Shapiro so eloquently talks about in Devotion, these [...]
