June 12, 2025 Birthday Cake Start with a clean house.OK, well, if not clean exactly,Your messes discreetly set aside.Company ready. Flour the floor,Inadvertently, as youFlour the cake pans,7 of them,To make, as requestedChocolate and strawberry. Old champagne in the fridge,Was it leftover from Easter?Flat for weeks,Like so many things left around the housePast their prime,You failed to discard it...
May 29, 2025 Haven does not want to be on a stage. It is clear on those accidental occasions when she is put on one anyway, when, for example, the current of the school calendar winds its way through events like ‘spring concert,’ and ‘poetry festival.’ With a dozen other four-year-olds, she is, with great ceremony and enthusiasm, ushered to the small elevated platform in the school gym. Guiding...
“How can you tell a story about plants or chores that would be very interesting?” A friend offered this honest response to my invitations to join the upcoming experiential storytelling workshops. “Maybe it takes someone who’s good at creative writing,” he continued, with an unspoken note of regret: And I’m not that someone. Perhaps you have also asked this question. Maybe, like my friend...
April 30, 2025 The peony plant is in its third year. By now it should be developing deep roots, eyes forming along the original tuber as it spreads underground to form multiple stalks, shooting up into an abundance of blooms. This plant is a dark red color I adore, the deep maroon that formed the backdrop of our wedding colors, the perfect foil for the swoonworthy fluffy pale pink Sarah Bernhardt...
“I meditate on what is great” – the opening lines of a song I’ve been taken by the past few weeks. The end of a long work day, a frantic push to get something done on an impossibly tight timeline, the baton momentarily passed out of my hand. My son, the only child at home. A sun-kissed early spring evening, not-cold for the first time in memory, spring bulbs emerging in force. I could get more...
March 11, 2025 One of my stated goals of the sabbatical I took between April-December 2024 was spend more time reading for the joy of it. Do you love to read? I do, in theory. But in ordinary life, it seems I love less the reading, and more self-improvement. I’m mildly embarrassed at the designation of ‘self help’ that accompany many of the titles gracing my shelves. Each individual book has its...
April 19, 2024 “I shall not want” the chorus echoes, a refrain I hold like a worn lovey. It is hard explaining this to my children, who cannot fathom a world without the primal fire of wanting, or why that would be a good thing. “Think about everything you want, the things you need, the things you enjoy—and all of those things not being there. We call that absence “wanting.” So, to ‘not want,’...
November 6, 2024 I pull nearly everything from the crisper out onto the counter, the staples you can munch mindlessly, raw, that I keep on hand for my best kid-hack, the ‘rainbow platter.’ The wilting scallions. The zucchini starting to go off. To this I add the pittance of vegetables I have grown and harvested myself, the last of the sweet peppers, the last of the onions planted 18 months...
February 4-5, 2024 Brioche is a physically and emotionally demanding project, a labor of love. I bequeath it upon my loved ones on special occasions, a long holiday weekend or a beloved teacher’s birthday. It’s what you do when you want to wow someone. I once blew my daughter’s friends’ minds when, on my turn in the gymnastics carpool, I doled out slices of freshly baked brioche to...
January 17, 2024 Photo by Curtis Yee, @supercurtisman A friend offered to bring cake to our weekly small group meeting, but held off when she heard I was planning to bake a cake. “My dessert can wait til next week. I can’t say no to a Jeannie Rose cake!” I replied, “It’s mostly an excuse to use up some clementines that had gotten too hard to peel. Cake is like the...