A few notes on writing, cooking, working, reading, from the long, hot month of May.
Category Archives: Master of the house
A few things: January 2018
“To read a poem in January is as lovely as to go for a walk in June.” – Jean-Paul Sartre Our Christmas tree sparkled clear through Epiphany and beyond, lighting that particular corner of its room for so long that we were tempted to just leave it up. “When it starts to brown, we can…
A few notes: October 2017
A little more than a year ago, I started a new job, taking the helm of a well-established but fragile nonprofit agency dedicated to ending family violence. Someday I’m going to write about the experience; but today isn’t that day. Today I have something else in mind, keeping with the theme of sifting and sorting…
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We rose before dawn, in the dead of winter, when the only light was the moon’s reflection on the Nebraska snow. We lived in a small, four-room guesthouse – a generous term, as the “guesthouse” was a two-story garage, the top half converted into living quarters: two bedrooms, each barely big enough for a bed,…
Rooted.
Twenty years ago, give or take a few weeks, on a cold, rainy Saturday, I was living by myself in a guest house a few blocks from the Joslyn Castle in Omaha. It was an old, historic neighborhood – not unlike my neighborhood in Memphis, today, with houses in varying states of renovation and residents…
Babies, tarnish and dust.
The part of this that is a story, at the beginning, is mostly true and very short – hardly even a story, it’s so short. But it’s true nonetheless, in the important ways, and amended appropriately because it isn’t mine. A number of years ago a dear friend was hosting Thanksgiving dinner. More specifically, a…
Labor days.
It is Labor Day weekend, summer’s last hurrah. It’s the weekend many parents, mostly mothers, heave a sigh of relief. We made it. As Motherlode’s KJ Dell’Antonia wrote back in June, the 104 days of summer vacation are a nightmare for working parents, particularly those with no extended family willing or able to help. It’s…
In vino veritas.
Oh, screw it; it’s 5 o’clock somewhere. Let’s talk about wine; everything else is too depressing. In our many family moves during my youth, there were a few belongings, in addition to clothes, dishes and furniture, that always made the journey from one stopping place to the next: the Encyclopaedia Britannica set; the heirloom Christmas…
