On a Saturday morning in the middle of October, you will sit on your porch and let your coffee warm itself in the sun. Your child will be nearby, toddling around in a shirt and a diaper, peeking through the shrubs to watch the traffic — constant, hurried, loud. The cat will be somewhere around you, eating spider webs and green things, relishing his momentary freedom. You’ll be planning your day, trying to plot out…
There is a spider just outside the front window. She is suspended on a single thread, bisecting it between the points where it is attached to the pane. She’s halfway between her origin and her destination, dangling and swaying back and forth in the breeze. She’s dead. Kicked ye olde bucket while making a go at another web: her first, seventh, dozenth, hundreth — who really even knows but her. There is just the one…
This is going to sound like bad poetry because I am not sure how best to articulate it. But I’ll try. Once in a while, the mind takes hold of something and slows down everything around it — the clock ticking, the Earth’s revolutions, the breaths coming from your own nostrils — as if to crystallize and distill and separate out the destination, faint pinprick as it may be, from the rest of the ordinary…
This life springs people and circumstances into your orbit you must evaluate and categorize carefully should they prove useful or harmful or worth more time than you initially thought. Or less. It is the waiting to find out which shelf to put you on that I have little patience for. My brain fancies itself a label-maker, one of those crude punch-letter contraptions, and it is constantly wanting to slap an explanatory strip on everything, and…
My mind is this great humming butter churn of a thing, moving unformed chunks of ideas around slowly and with great struggle. I have nothing to write about. It is driving me fucking bonkers. I have been sitting here staring at this screen, trying to make it happen, trying to remember something, anything, worth sharing and I have nothing. Everything is extremely mundane. I can’t just write about my kid all the time, cool as…
Last January, I did one of these so I could remember how it was taking care of a newborn while on maternity leave. I figured I’d do one again while I am a Working Mother of a Toddler, so that in a year or two when my life has changed yet again (spoiler alert: it just keeps changing!), I can look back and try to remember what this life was like. So here is a…
Sometimes I ache so hard for a future life that it ruins my whole day. Many people, most people(?) live their whole lives and they don’t get what they want. And that’s OK. Because no one is entitled to get what they want. Even if what they want is totally reasonable. Why the fuck should the universe align itself so that you get what you want? That is not the purpose or the function of…
It’s 10 p.m. and I’m sitting at a blue plastic table, sipping a canned Coke. I’m surrounded by banks of whirring silver washing machines, and I’ve figured out that by sitting at this table, I can feel the blasts of cold air from the AC. It’s a nice counter to the heat radiating off all these dryers. This is the Wash Tub Coin Laundry, open 25 hours, according to a sign on the side of…
The pace of everything is maddening. I am having a hard time getting settled, getting footing, re-settling on routines. I hate living out of boxes and I hate feeling like I don’t know anything about my own life anymore. It’s part of the transition but not having any time to sit and think and wallow in what I should do is really throwing me for a loop. That checklist of stressful life events? I am…
I look at these pictures and they pluck a string of intense familiarity in me. It makes me sad, in some ways, that I won’t be raising my family on a farm. I got just a taste of it as a kid and turned out to be more of a city gal, so I guess if I had stuck around (and my own family hadn’t majorly downsized our farming efforts due to a variety of…
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