November first is a special holiday for Bob and me. For us, it represents our first day of happily ever after. It was the day Bob was unexpectedly fired from his job. We were shocked. Embarrassed. Scared shitless. We had only closed on our house two weeks’ prior, and our first mortgage bill arrived in […]
Subsistence Empire
The floor of the car is littered with paint chips. Bob and I have been choosing colors for our newest Sap Bush Hollow enterprise: the vacation rental, to be located in the apartment over the post office, next to the cafe. We bought the post office building in our hamlet two years ago partly to […]
Chronic Hope
It’s 4 am, and I’m alone with a field of crickets outside my window screens, two dogs, one pressure canner, and 35 quarts of tomato sauce. It’s the week before Labor Day. Since 2011, I have a thing about canning tomatoes before Labor Day. It seems like we’re all learning special names that make our […]
August
I remember when August was defined by crickets pulsing through the day and night; by goldenrods stretching tall to meet the deep blue sky; by the blackberries that lured me off the roadsides, slicing my legs and arms as payment for their plump fruit. I remember how August was the calm before the storm of […]
Love & Duty
“May I do my work out of love, and not out of duty.” I say this every day as part of my morning prayer. I added it in a few years back, when homeschooling Saoirse and Ula was at its most challenging. Like every over-achieving mom, I was having a hard time sorting out what […]
Culture Shock
Is this character, or is this cultural? I’ve just returned home from the cafe for lunch to find two Spanish teenagers melted across my living room couch, faces illuminated by smartphones. My own teenager has retreated to help her dad stack the firewood. I don’t think they notice she’s left them. They don’t even notice […]
Adventures in Shopping
“We’re at a store called Pink. Did you know you can try on thongs over your shorts?” This is a week of many firsts: Saoirse’s first “hang out” at the mall with Martina, our foreign exchange student from Madrid; her first siting of a Wendy’s restaurant; her first exposure to the makeup aisle at Wal-Mart, […]
The Other America
Going to watch fireworks is the last thing I want to do on the Fourth of July. I’m mulling over the possible excuses and reasons I can present to get out of it as Bob and I walk the dirt road, scanning the blossoms on the elderberry bushes. We’re checking to see if any of […]
The Business of Creativity
Become a Patron When I was a teenager, my mom had a prescient friend who traveled to New Orleans with her. An aspiring jazz sax player myself, I longed to go with them, but had to stay home and go to school. While wandering down Bourbon Street one lazy afternoon, they came upon a young […]
Truth & Dreams
My graduate school advisors would not clear me to begin my research on Schoharie County agriculture before I could proficiently discuss the nature of truth. Was I a positivist, one who believes that truth can be known, most often through quantification, and therefore predicted and controlled? Or was I more of a naturalist, who believed […]