I try not to use social media, but I can’t bring myself to quit entirely. Despite the evil it has wrought, Facebook remains a good way to keep tabs on friends I otherwise don’t see or connect with often, or at all. I decided a while ago that these sweet updates were worth the otherwise […]
Parenting
I first published this post in April, 2020. Today things are better, but not fixed. We have childcare, but it feels precarious. There are snow days and teacher training days and holidays and sick days. So Many Sick Days. On Mondays, public school ends at 1:45pm. ONE FORTY-FIVE! And there are still too many things […]
My dad’s 100th birthday would have been this weekend. 100! It seems incredible—so many years since 1923, so many things that happened in them. How different it must have been, how many things might have been not so different at all. These are the things I think I remember that he told me: behind […]
I have a new mantra. Live your life, kids. Sure, have the chocolate muffin for breakfast. Wear the nice shoes on the playground. Use the fine china. Eat the marshmallow. Life is short. You might not get another marshmallow, despite what people tell you, so enjoy what you have while it lasts. My older daughter […]
In recent months, I’ve spent most of my time in Bremen, a coastal fishing village just down the peninsula from Damariscotta, Maine. Often my husband joins me. Bremen is Maine the way you think of it–our neighbors haul lobsters, dredge clams, pull kelp, and farm oysters. There’s an emergency doc who doubles as a vet […]
My daughter had her braces removed a couple of weeks ago. This was a big occasion for her and to mark it I told her she could have whatever heretofore verboten food she wanted. She asked for gum—her first in about two years. I handed her the pack when she came out of the orthodontist’s […]
When I was sixteen, my voice teacher predicted I would become a Jack of all trades. It wasn’t a compliment: We were in the midst of a fight, squaring off across the shiny black battlefield of her baby grand piano. She wanted me to concentrate only on singing. But I couldn’t imagine abandoning subjects like […]
They were dark forms scattered up and down the beach. One here, three there, a pair just beyond them. Their larger size distinguished them from the other shorebirds, drawing our attention. “What are they?” my dad asked. “Whimbrels,” I said. We were at Fort Stevens, a few miles outside of Astoria, Oregon, my hometown. My […]