Just now I was both excited and alarmed to see Catherine Newman has a new essay online. Excited because her writing is the way I write, her kids close in age to my kids, her brain in the same fire-alarm mode about our country. Alarmed because I’ll never be her. Instead I’ll be me, living […]

Last night I talked out loud while dreaming. I have no record of the sentences spoken, just my husband asking me what I was dreaming, did I know I was speaking? I am speaking. I am speaking. Can you hear me? I see the backs of people I used to love who love me no […]

Before 9/11, my 9/11 was the day I stepped off of a train into Seattle, a place I had never been but had decided to make my home. The skies were blue and I couldn’t believe I had randomly picked a place that was so beautiful to call home. On 9/11, I was pregnant with […]

A friend of mine told me that when her mom was battling cancer she placed an Albert Camus poem on her bedroom door: “In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer.” Ahh, summer, your golden sheen has a timetable. Inside of us, we are strong and solid, standing up […]

“It doesn’t matter if the water is warm or cold if you are going to have to wade through it anyway.” -Pierre Teilhard Chardin My Annie is a hesitant school attendee; her leaning issues makes her hours there more work. But we are on year 8 of K-8 school, 6th grade, and she’s more adept […]

I haven’t figured out how to breathe into this newness. I thought I had planned for this reality: my teen gone on and off for most of 4 weeks. I mean, you can plan for loss, right? Wrong. The ache in my chest feels as real as my daughter’s empty room. I thought if I […]

  I am alone and hungry. I eat the leftover puff pancake cold and drink the temperate coffee. I want to vacuum the whole house, remove the dust and debris that’s gathered in the months since we vacuumed. All of summer swept up into the vacuum bag, the record of time passing to be tossed […]

Love is the wallpaper I want to paste on my walls. I picture the print as gorgeous fleur-de-lis pattern, solid silvers and grey-blue swirls on an off-white background. So upstanding and righteous and out of reach. The way I would need to breath to keep that paper intact as I lifted it to my wall […]

I practice telling myself my Annie’s problems are not problems until the phrase “not a problem” becomes a mantra. It’s a mantra I need because my brain loves to think I have many unsolvable problems. I’m not sure if this ability to see everything as crisis is genetic or learned. That I’m even wondering about […]

There is no rhythm to the summer schedule. Or if there is, it’s too tiny for me to hear it so soon. There is one small stone after another, some on the floor of the house, some in my pocket gathered from the shores of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. It sounds so glorious […]