“There’s sex,” I chime cheerfully from the passenger seat. Bob’s icy stare barely cracks. We’re winding up the dirt road, headed home for lunch with the girls. “And chocolate!” He doesn’t respond. “And coffee! And we still have Barbers’ vodka…..just down the road!!!! And there’s all those puppy noses. Really. How can the world be […]
For All Souls
Bob and I have had a special tradition since 1999. In 2013 I wrote about it. This coming week, we’ll be celebrating again. I hope you all find similar freedom and joy in your hearts this week. Every November first, I wake up early. I do not check for messages, or sit down to write. I […]
Farmer Scrooge
I’m out with the broilers in the second field back, watching Bob as he drives the tractor from the barnyard. This is the last batch of chickens for the season. Late afternoon sun bounces off the roof as he navigates through the pastures, his big brown eyes focused on keeping the crates in the […]
Swords & Pens
“The pen is mightier than the sword.” It was an odd bit of Shakespeare for a farmer/reproductive physiologist to quote to his daughter. I’m not sure when I first heard those words from Dad. It may have been in kindergarten, when I clobbered a bully on the head with my lunch pale. Spoken words had […]
FLUSHED: When parenting dogma goes down the toilet
Bob and I took the girls backpacking in the Adirondacks this week, so I didn’t get a chance to write a post. That said, my brother and his wife are expecting their first baby later this fall, and as a result I’ve been thinking a lot about this story I wrote back in the spring […]
The Perseids
I was seventeen when I discovered the shooting stars. I was so enthralled that my best friends from high school, Jonathan and Louigi, fellow band geeks, came up to the farm. We spent an August night in our sleeping bags on the hillside behind the barn, watching the Perseids, trying to think of ways […]
Mellow.
“I gotta go, ‘cuz Mellow’s getting anxious.” Mellow, a charcoal Bichon Frise, pulls at the end of his leash and attempts to reach Bob and me with his forepaws as we walk up a strip of crumbled sidewalk in the city of Schenectady’s Stockade district. His owner, talking to another fellow on a stoop, […]
The Fifteens
“Forget acting. I’m going to be an eco-saboteur.” She turns fifteen this month. These are the first words out of her mouth when Grammie brings her back to the cafe from wilderness survival summer camp. I think I’m holding my own at the espresso bar in her absense, but she gives me a light hip […]
What would Henry David say?
“For my greatest skill has been to want but little.” When I read this line in Walden, I repeated it out loud. I wrote it down. I emblazoned it across my brain, forged it into my heart, considered tattooing it across my chest. I was a mother of two by then, but they were […]
Smoothies & Hormones
“Kids! We gotta be in the car in 15 minutes! Let’s MOVE!” “But Mom!” Ula lobs her words from her pillow, over the stair railing and down into the kitchen where they land, smoking, at my feet. “You have to make our smoothies!” Imperitives don’t sit well with me today. This is an invitation to […]
- « Previous Page
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- …
- 15
- Next Page »