Did you have a time when you asked what you would do with your life? Did you find an answer, then stop asking? I thought, when I was younger, that’s how it worked. People got jobs and that settled it. Fireman. Teacher. Pilot. As a college student, back when it wasn’t weird to be unsettled, when we were supposed to be dreaming about who we would become, I wrote a poem reflecting on this...
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...
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 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...
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...
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...
For the last year, our oldest child has been begging for a toy kitchen. Our former neighbors had the ubiquitous IKEA kitchen. Before they moved, our son would plead to go play at their house, even though their kids are younger, so he could access his favorite toy. Now that vaccines have made playdates possible again, I frequently hear about the magical lives of other kids in other families who...
January 24, 2022 Today’s cake begins last fall, with pancakes. More precisely, our five year old son’s desire to share the joy of pancakes with his soccer team. Our pre-soccer Saturday morning tradition, in addition to those glorious morning snuggles, is sourdough discard pancakes, made from the gloppy, sour mash leftover from feeding my sourdough starter. Yet another beautiful thing from...
January 13, 2022 When I see the school administrator lighting up my phone Tuesday morning, my heart fills with dread. Since early December, when we left for an early holiday family visit, we’ve had one blissful day of all three kids in childcare. There’s a direct correlation between number of days in a row the kids are at home and how frequently I yell. The sanity breaks afforded by my childcare...
January 9, 2022 The rain feels fat and semi-solid, like snow that has only just melted moments before landfall. We’re holed up indoors, except for one intrepid trip down treacherously compacted-snow-covered back stairs: time to put the Christmas decorations away, now that we’re in Epiphany; time to empty a week and a half of frozen compost that’s been sitting outside, covered in snow; time to...