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Sono Così Emozionante
You are very clever, youse. In our recent guessing game of “Where in the World Will Sabbatical Take Them?,” quite a few commenters came very close, or even rightly named, our family’s likely port of call for our upcoming travels. Here’s the summary of how we got to our current perch: 1) Jocelyn was born. …
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Deep in the Heart
Some of y’all might remember that my sister flew me to Denver last October so’s I could help her organize her stuff. Upon my return from that fun weekend, I posted something on Facebook about it…only to have a pal from college reply, “I would totally buy your plane ticket, if you’d come help me…
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Doldrums Antidotes
1) Antidote #1: Get a good night’s sleep, which is exactly what I did the night of my previous post; when I woke up nine hours later, cobwebs had cleared, and a song–not a dirge–beat in my heart. This, in turn, meant I had to spend a fair amount of time in the kitchen that…
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Lots of Landmines; No Metal Detector: Part the Last
A few years ago, I tuned in to a documentary about life in the Alaskan bush, where there are no roads, no stores, no schools. In particular, I was impressed with a 16-year-old girl who lived in the bush with her parents; in one memorable scene, she loaded up her sled, hitched up her dogs,…
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Lots of Landmines, No Metal Detector: Part the Third
With each successive child, it becomes harder to keep World at bay. The door that cracked open with Child #1 gets shoved even wider with Child #2, Child #3, and so on, until the barrier is blasted off its hinges to expose an entire startled-looking family licking Cheeto gunk off their fingers. The humbling that comes from giving way and giving…
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Lots of Landmines, No Metal Detector: Part the Second
If that bitch, World, isn’t open to negotiating with parents and insists on staring down the well-intentioned sleep deprived, hands on its Costco-shopping, NASCAR-jacket-wearing, Miley-Cyrus-twitching hips, then maybe the compromises have to take place elsewhere. Like within the well-intentioned sleep deprived. Certainly, new parents have a few blissful months–even years–in which their personal values dominate, in…
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Lots of Landmines, No Metal Detector: The First of Several on This Topic
When a child is born, the parent enters into a decades-long negotiation with the world. The script for this give-and-take reads: Parent, puffing out chest: “Surrounded by a loving village of friends and family, my child will never question that she is loved.” World, yawning: “Fiddlesticks.” Parent, still confident: “I will provide steadiness and an open…
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Protests Quashed
For once and all, I’m surrendering. I don’t hate poetry after all. The issue in my early years seems to have been the wrong poetry applied to the wrong brain. Now that I’m flailing through Older Years, I keep bumping into precisely the right stuff. Finally, I get it. Poetry says stuff differently enough that we…
