I distinctly remember, as a child, looking at the cover of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory and thinking: those words are what I want. In particular I gravitated towards glory (I’ve never been very interested in power). That’s what I thought I wanted to be able to say I’d had at the end [...]
People ask me, with some regularity, how I “do it all.” Of course, I don’t. There is plenty I don’t do. And I have been thinking about that a lot lately, of the immensely different ways we each populate our hours and what they say about what we value. Every hour of our life is [...]
Thanksgiving. I am thankful for so much that I sometimes feel gratitude like a swell in my chest, pressing on me from the inside out. And yet, there is still so much here I do not understand (Adrienne Rich). Loved ones circle around tables and take time to consider that which matters most, the world [...]
Five years ago we celebrated Thanksgiving with my parents and my father’s whole family (picture above taken after I had bathed the children and was about to put Whit, in his red fleece footy pajamas – sob – into the car for the drive home). Grace had just turned 4 and Whit was not yet [...]
I love the sky, and trees, and in particular the interplay between them. I’ve written before about my continued – fruitless – efforts to capture the light on the trees outside my house in the morning and the evening. This futility reminds me of how I’ve often tried to photograph falling snow and been similarly [...]
If you want your children to be intelligent, read them fairy tales. – Einstein I just adore this quote. Putting aside for a minute my essential belief that raw intelligence is innate, I agree with everything that Einstein means with this single beautiful sentence. Why? For lots of reasons. Fairy tales are where the archetypes [...]
Poetry holds the knowledge that we are alive and that we know we’re going to die. The most mysterious aspect of being alive might be that — and poetry knows that. I read these sentences, from Terry Gross, on Beth Kephart’s beautiful blog last week and I simultaneously gasped and welled up with tears. As [...]
I went to New York for work last Friday. It was a gray, rainy morning, dense with fog, and I sat in my seat on the airplane looking out of the small oval window stressing out about getting home that afternoon. I have enormous travel anxiety: not about safety while flying, but about weather. I [...]
About a month ago I fell when I was running. I’ve done this before, and have written often of my clumsiness. This was a real fall, though, and I caught myself with my right hand. I scraped off a lot of skin on my palm; the entire heel of it was hanging off in a [...]
I found this meme/questionnaire on Somemother through Meagan Francis’ wonderful blog The Happiest Mom (I highly recommend it and read it religiously). I just liked it and hope you will join in and participate – just link in the comments!! ESTABLISHING YOURSELF (a few details that help somemothers know what they have in common with [...]
