November 6, 2024 It’s a beautiful day in DC, sunbeams filtering through starbursts of leaves against clear blue sky; my fall flowers glimmer in the front yard, birds chirp cheerfully in the trees. It’s all so normal and lovely—a stark contrast from the funereal mood of the city. A friend whose husband is traveling, like mine is, slept over, and in the morning our kids tumble around the house...
November 2, 2024 I return home after ten days away and without any effort whatsoever notice what’s wrong. The neon pink mums I labored to plant before I left didn’t get watered, and they’re shriveled now. Squirrels have dug in the pots, seeking homes for buried treasure and leaving a trail of dirt in their wake. The porch is covered in dirt and leaves, joint effort of squirrel, bird, wind. And...
October 17, 2024 “I don’t think she likes me anymore,” my daughter confided after school, talking of her new best friend—the one she’d made over the summer, just after her previous best friend moved across the country. Tears glistened in her eyes, lips quivering, brows tilted inward and down. Her normally bright face looks up at me, asking for me to make it untrue. “Oh honey, I’m sorry, that...
[Fortitude as an essential virtue which allows the ‘house’ of our soul to be kept in order for the presence of God; “s]uch fortitude is not the virtue of the dashing soldier. It means rather the virtue of the keeper of the fortress; the inconspicuous heroism that sits tight. And in the life of the spirit there is a great deal of sitting tight; of refusing to be frightened out of or decoyed away...
September 19, 2024 A rainbow of living interruptions seen on a walk in the woods The polka dot white freckles on the tan hide of a young deer, cautiously tearing at leaves as it makes eye contact with me, fifteen feet away on the trail, it’s mother a few feet to the left. Would I make a move? Is it safe to continue feasting? What is that flash of navy, my raincoat, one color in this animal’s...
September 20, 2024 I’ve been doing a lot of writing over the past month, in my quest to evolve from “person who unleashes a steady stream of words on my laptop” to “writer people actually read.” (The fact that I’ve created these categories betrays my anxiety about being a pretender, as though I don’t count as a real writer without a publication’s stamp of approval.) If there’s one thing I know...
September 13, 2024 As I’ve simultaneously embarked on my sabbatical, which ought to make me rested, and my training to be a spiritual director, which ought to make me good, I’ve stumbled into an uncomfortable reality: I am often cranky. Angry, even. Without dwelling too long upon the actual anger and what to make of it, the subject of a longer essay I’m working on, suffice to say I don’t feel...
September 2, 2024 It’s the same joke every time: “to be alone in nature, we need all this?” This, followed by a sweeping gesture at the mounting stack of bags of equipment and bins of gear we assemble for our few days in the woods. In the bags and bins, a portable bedroom, kitchen, furniture, which we tote from our urban basement past the suburbs, up a mountain road, to a gravel covered square...
April 15, 2024 We scoot down the neighborhood streets on our annual pilgrimage to the massive cherry tree from which are, generously, strung three swings. Opposite, someone has thoughtfully placed a bench for parents to sit and enjoy the scene. Every April these blossoms explode into magnificent pink pom poms, lush, fragile, effervescent. They are extravagant and short-lived, exploding from bare...
February 25-26, 2024 I habitually ask for bread when we eat out, which isn’t often, not because I want the bread as much as I do the sauce. It is not generally considered restaurant manners in our culture, although I’ve certainly done it, to full on lick a plate prior to it being cleared, but when so much of the flavor is trapped in streaks on the pottery set before me, one could be forgiven for...