January 5, 2025 Among the things we are grateful for this past year, my husband added this: those times when at least one child eats my cooking. Pleasing a single child is not so hard. Our eight year old son meets the dinner table with surprising flexibility. I ask which cross-section of the options I compile on an ordinary weeknight he would like on his plate, and he often replies, “Chef’s...
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...
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...
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...
February 5, 2024 I had an order to start fulfilling the same night I had to take my son to urgent care with a severe case of please don’t let it be pinkeye, a play for the preventative doctor’s note a parent seeks to keep their kid in school rather than being sent home mid-day by surprise. It wasn’t pinkeye. It wasn’t an infection either, deduced by another doctor brought...
January 14, 2023 I went hunting for ways to use up bananas that didn’t involve bread, and naturally found my way down a rabbit hole of puddings. I’m not southern, but I’ve lived around enough of them in DC to understand the value of a good banana pudding, and to know I wasn’t willing to work that hard. No buying Nilla wafers, no baking my own. I wanted something less than...
October 1, 2022 I’m the only soccer mom this morning. It’s windy and cold, fields wet with the leftovers of the early stages of Hurricane Ian and threatening more rain at any moment. “Yeah, the dads drew the short end of the stick today!” one of the other parents calls out cheerfully, as I join the handful of dads who have accompanied their six year olds to this morning’s game. “And not a lot of...
August 26, 2022 In advance of vacation, we can look forward to the time away as a kind of salvation from the normal life that has grown to feel wearisome, like a burden. We’ll leave our boring normal life, and experience a taste of real life, something beautiful and thrilling. We’ll rest, we’ll adventure, we’ll get good instagram photos. But when vacation ends, real life is waiting, collecting a...