"I know you said you don't want any of this, but I think you'll actually want one thing," he said, dropping some folded papers on the kitchen table. It was a letter, five pages in long-hand, from my mother to my father, a few months before they married. When we had gathered the belongings from my mother's garage years ago, the letter must have slipped from a box into an adjacent pile.
Here's something important: getting up. Get. Up. That's how I say it to myself, sometimes. Actually, that's almost always how I say it to myself, sometimes aloud, especially during the school year. Get. Up. Jennifer. Do it now. I say this to myself when it is still dark outside and the alarm has gone off, … Continue reading The gift of melancholy.
Here's what I know about careening toward 50, the age I will reach in less than a month: You walk by a mirror and wonder just who the hell put an old lady costume on your 36-year-old self. If you are one of the handful of readers for whom 30 is a distant, looming part … Continue reading Stardust and princess slippers.
Water, light and food. If wall charts could talk, they'd tell you these are the things plants need to survive, to advance from seeds into leaf bearers. Wall charts work better, of course, with human interpreters: gardeners, farmers, teachers. It's one thing to diagram photosynthesis but another to act out how plants grow cattywampus if … Continue reading Seeds.
