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One Monday evening before the clocks change, I fly to Florence to attend the wedding of an old college friend. I’d arranged everything at the very last minute, and travel alone and somewhat circuitously, leaving Boston just before midnight on a Monday and arriving in Florence some eighteen hours later. None of this is interesting…
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My sister is in an art cult whose focus is on forms of attention that are resistant to capitalism. My sister is not a working artist, exactly; perhaps she is no longer a member; perhaps membership is for life, or at least a stage of it, like a real cult. We were walking together through the…
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The summer of 2008, on the east end of Long Island – it was the disintegration of a dream, those mad, tilting moments between dream and fantasy and fever dream and nightmare. It was the summer of the Montauk Monster and the first season of the Real Housewives of New York and flip video cameras.…
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In early spring, I take a pitchfork to the long-buried borders, unpeeling packet after packet of dead maple leaves. The snowdrops underneath are a startled, resentful chartreuse. I scrub moss off the barn doors with dish soap and hearty amounts of borax and wage sisyphean battles on the den carpet’s behalf against the profligate mud…
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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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