Of Hospitals, and Butterflies, and Praise
We’ve been here before: waiting for that callback from the on-call nurse, waiting to find out if we’re headed to the emergency room with this child. But it never has been this child. Her older brothers, yes. From staples in the scalp to midnight croup, from epi-pen jabs to that one nightmarish choking incident. We’ve called 911. We’ve...
Why We Must Not Stop Grieving
There are days that plod, one after the other, days of sameness and stasis. Summer days are often like that. Sometimes it is a hard thing, and sometimes it is a gift. Our recent vacation days in the Adirondacks were a gift, but remembering them now is like remembering one long day, so slow and similar were they. Then there are days when...
These Farmhouse Bookshelves (And The Ministry Of Flowers)
(this post contains affiliate links) I moved to this old farmhouse with dreams of a garden, but it wasn't a flower garden. What an extravagant dream that would have been. I was a garden do-gooder. If you had asked me to place a spiritual value on a box of seed packets, tomatoes for canning and cucumbers for pickling would have risen...
Life Right Now
* I always know just how long it's been since we moved to this old farmhouse called Maplehurst. I can judge it by the length of her curls and the stoutness of her legs. I was eight-months pregnant when I watched the London Olympics surrounded by teetering piles of unpacked cardboard boxes. Elsa Spring was born six weeks after we moved in. This...
Summer Song (Feel Free to Cry Along)
My children have spent the past week with their grandparents. Untethered from their needs, I spent the week living in my head. Daydreams, interior monologues, thoughts, prayers, and wishes: the inner world is my favorite landscape. It is quiet there, and I am all alone. * I set several overly-ambitious writing goals for the week. I also...
These Farmhouse Bookshelves (In a Time of Violence)
(an installment in my occasional series of book recommendations; this post contains affiliate links) These are violent days. What good are books? Of what use is poetry? In his elegy for W. B. Yeats, the poet W. H. Auden famously wrote, "poetry makes nothing happen." Yet the poem itself complicates this view. Poetry may or may not change a...
