Dear Whit, Today you start kindergarten. I’m astonished, in a way both cliched and powerful, that we are here. For three years you didn’t say much of anything. Your first preschool teacher, in fact, urged us to have you evaluated by a speech therapist. She even gently suggested that you might have cognitive delays. Within [...]
The universe has a way of timing things just right. Just days ago I was sad about summer ending, about the closing of this magical time with my children, these three months dotted with highlights and plenty of tiny moments in between. And then they became monsters. Oh, wow, is it time for school. Something [...]
I listened to Fix You by Coldplay on repeat yesterday morning on my commute to work. It was my second to last day in the office, and my fear of change is really taking root. As I’ve written before, I’m not good at change. I’m especially not good at endings, which feel like they’re piling [...]
I’ve been thinking today about the places in our lives that hold our rawest and most treasured memories. Sometimes physical space seems so mute, so indifferent; it surprises me that somehow the important moments that have transpired in a place don’t remain there, echoing, animate, alive somehow. Maybe they do. Occasionally, in returning to a [...]
Memory. Where to start? I’ve written so much about it. About the mysterious alchemy whereby small moments, inconsequential as we lived them, become significant, weighty memories, full of recollected details. About the way that certain songs can transport me back, instantly and vividly, to the past. About the occasional awareness of the memory of a [...]
Courage. I’ve been thinking about this word, this concept, this idea, all weekend. Trying to figure out what to share for this inaugural Five for Ten post. Certainly I don’t feel I have much, so that was easy to dismiss. I kept coming back, over and over again, to Susie. Susie was like a mother [...]
For some reason I’ve had an image from one of my kids’ books, a Magic Schoolbus book about archaeological digs, in my head today. It’s a picture of an archaeologist crouching in the sand, sifting materials through one of those flat trays with a fine mesh bottom. Looking for pieces of treasure, fossils, messages from [...]
During my run yesterday I was aware of the wild abandon with which the trees in my neighborhood have burst into bloom. The magnolias in particular always remind me, with visceral power, of spring in Princeton. Magnolias, their smell, their color, their silhouette against a blue sky, are as inextricably linked with my four springs [...]
Friday Matt took the kids out for dinner and taught them his favorite party trick (yes, those are napkin boobs). I had dinner with two of my dearest friends from college. We are all in various aspects of transition, and sometimes it feels like we all orbit each other like atoms, always aware of one [...]
Found this little bit of memory on a blog I stumbled across, Samosas for One. Instantly I was back in the room of a fellow freshman, a guy from Texas, I think, and I remember a big Texas flag hanging on the wall (I don’t think I ever went into someone from Texas’s room without [...]
