éclaircissements

  • Blog
  • Fiction
  • Cherchez La Femme
  • Elegy for a Pool

    Elegy for a Pool

    The other week, an old friend texted me a link to a story in one of the local papers. The pool where we’d spent so much of our childhood would be closing, permanently, at the end of the summer. The engineer who’d been called to do the evaluation determined that the structure was, essentially, irredeemable.  […]

    Claire

    March 20, 2022
    Ephemera
    severance, swimming
  • a turn towards the periphery in order to reach the center

    a turn towards the periphery in order to reach the center

    My father in law belonged to the camp who write to know what they think. (Joan Didion, also recently deceased, was, famously, a member, along with Flannery O’Connor and E.M Forrester. (Make what you will of my not having quickly unearthed any famous male subscribers.)) I didn’t know this until I read so in a […]

    Claire

    January 17, 2022
    Words, Words, Words
    Ian Frazier, New York Review of Books, The New Yorker
  • They march on their soles up Main Street

    They march on their soles up Main Street

    This cannot be how I spend the final minutes of my final maternity leave: tidying. Emptying the compost. Ferrying laundry. I should fix the screen door, I think, as I gather up the scythe and the loppers under a sherbet fantasia sunset. I look at the sofa pillows on the playroom floor (earlier, my home-from-school-again-again-again […]

    Claire

    December 2, 2021
    Motherhood, On a Train
    Abigail Lorick, lucernarium, procrastination, The Last Samurai
  • Goodness, Deconcentration, and the Great Concavity

    Goodness, Deconcentration, and the Great Concavity

    Easter, 2014. I put on a chartreuse dress and lilac suede sandals and Brady and I go uptown to my great aunt’s where we eat mille feuille from Lady M and drink probably too much white wine out of small, weighty hock glasses. On the way home I get off the subway two stops early […]

    Claire

    October 21, 2021
    Book Talk, Running
    Alexey Molchanov, Spirituality
  • Just a chapter and not the story itself

    Just a chapter and not the story itself

    A second birthday, a third maternity leave. A second August and most of September in our new old house. Great rains sometimes fall / evening cicadas sing /dew glistens white on grass / swallows leave. This is the week that thunder ceases (more is expected this weekend). Like that, the baby is two months old. Like […]

    Claire

    September 23, 2021
    Book Talk, Motherhood, Pregnancy
    Little Children, Mrs. Fletcher, People v. Perez, Roe v Wade, The Suburbs, Tom Perotta
  • Matters of the Heart

    Matters of the Heart

    One of the great, enjoyable mysteries of any pregnancy is what the baby will look like. How strange, then, to know my daughter’s interior so intimately months before I saw her face.

    Claire

    August 18, 2021
    Motherhood, Pregnancy
    boston children's hospital, congenital heart disease, heart surgery
  • Inaudible as dreams, or: thoughts on discursion and A Life’s Work

    Inaudible as dreams, or: thoughts on discursion and A Life’s Work

    The first thing that occurred to me, as I watched the woman strike the child, was that surely I was not the only witness. A limpid, early summer evening, on a cul-de-sac of tightly spaced houses — surely other families were watching, from their back patios, their screened porches, their postage stamp front yards. At […]

    Claire

    July 6, 2021
    Book Talk, Motherhood
    A Life's Work, Ann Lamott, Fiction, Rachel Cusk
  • Sometimes It Blows Shut and Sometimes It Blows Open

    Sometimes It Blows Shut and Sometimes It Blows Open

    What was the name of the game we played as kids, where we’d crawl into our sleeping bags head-first and then, upright, attempt to topple one another? Caterpillar? (But those are horizontal.) Whatever it was called, I could never manage more than a few seconds of it. The bag would close in on me; my […]

    Claire

    May 8, 2021
    Covid Files, Motherhood
    George Floyd, mri, Penobscot, Pregnancy, sugar maple
  • codes so subtle that they change their whole meaning in half a line

    codes so subtle that they change their whole meaning in half a line

    A year and a day ago we packed up our car and drove to Vermont. For a day it was spring and then for a long while it was winter. That period feels like the airclay I got my son: you can mound it up or flatten it out or stretch it loooong. A year […]

    Claire

    March 21, 2021
    Book Talk, Covid Files
    caesura, jane yolen, owl moon, spring planting, the sportswriter, thom eagle
  • everything held together by tacit agreement that it would

    everything held together by tacit agreement that it would

    The afternoon is settling in fast, that nice, milkweed light you get in early winter pooling into my bedroom, the windows muffling the whipping noise of the cars and occasional truck as they exit and enter downtown. In Brooklyn, I always wrote (and, during quarantine, worked) in my bedroom, but in the suburbs, I have […]

    Claire

    January 9, 2021
    Covid Files, Words, Words, Words
    Far-Right Extremists, Leave the World Behind, Lydia Davis, Sledding
1 2 3 … 12
Next Page→

Website Powered by WordPress.com.

  • Follow Following
    • éclaircissements
    • Join 1,026 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • éclaircissements
    • Edit Site
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar