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“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” Skiparee is an unpaved road that cleaves to Mount Anthony’s graduated ascent, a clay and quartz limn up a spare corner of southwest Vermont. A modest mountain; a serious hill;…
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The French anthropologist Nastassja Martin described her encounter with a camchatma brown bear in the Siberian wilderness as: “A meeting, an implosion of boundaries, a melding of forms.” The moments she spent within the bear’s jaws, she writes, were “intimate beyond anything I could have imagined.” The experience cost Martin much of her face. A…
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Mid-September, my husband falls from the lowest branch of the hemlock tree beside the kitchen – twenty feet! – and breaks his leg. Beastly tree! Beastly ladder. The latter splayed where it has fallen, the unnatural diagonal, the beastly orange of it all – until my brother in law disposes of it. The ladder is…
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Everything that the lake was, the island was in concentrate. Forested, generously canopied, bouncily carpeted in princess moss and many inches of pine needles, encircled by a lone, narrow footpath that widened at the shoreline’s clasp. Heady, resin-green smell of pine and low-bush blueberry. My pulse took on the grandfather clock’s booming consistency; my footfalls,…
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Wasp-waisted island off the coast of Maine. The point in the afternoon where the heat has gathered itself up in folds. Independence Day, which feels, this year, like a sour joke. I’ve stolen away to the third floor of the old, expansive house where we are staying. To write, I have a blunt pencil and…
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I was in New York this week; I had gone for a run along the Hudson, a run in which I surprised myself by holding onto a sub-8 minute pace for eight miles, double the distance I’d done since my aborted half-marathon training last fall; I was hobbling into the dim lobby of the hotel,…
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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. …
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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…
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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…
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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…
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