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 […]
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 […]
Selfish Inner Goddess
“I don’t know how to parent you!” These words shock me as they shoot from my mouth on this steamy Fourth of July morning beside the edge of Mallet pond. Ula’s back is to me, facing the water. She’s been with her friends all week. She’s been with friends all summer. But they are not […]
Bullfrogs and Graveyards
Jug-a-rum, jug-a-rum, jug-a-rum. I don’t think much of the Westchesters who own the vacation house next door. But I think a lot about their pond. My bedroom windows are up against the state forest, and as I fall to sleep at night, they channel in the songs of the thrushes. The clerestories above me […]
Women’s Work
I’m not used to being invisible. It’s true that I’m happy to go for days on end seeing no people. It’s true that social contact takes a lot of energy for me to muster. But it’s also true that, when I am seated in a room with people, I expect to be seen and acknowledged. […]
Selfish
Selfish Bitch. To my mind, those are about the cruelest words that can be uttered to a woman. It isn’t that I haven’t encountered (or employed) more extreme vulgarities. But the venom in that accusation contains the most poison. It tells a woman who has stood up for herself or seen to her own needs […]
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