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My dog died, and a week later, my second son turned one. I got Gita the year I turned sixteen. A quid pro quo, with the quo my being kinder to my mother’s boyfriend. A smart negotiator, I asked for the quid upfront, and rapidly abandoned any attempt at the quo. I found her in
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I have an office now. A genuine room of one’s own. It has walls of planked pine painted periwinkle blue and a ceiling that only just clears the top of my head. Most of the walls in the house are stone plaster, meaning you can’t just go hang up any old thing — but not
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June 17th Who lives in New York? People live here. Crossing guards who conduct the blaring Mac trucks and motorcycles and antsy travelers of Flatbush Avenue with impassive grace but break into smiles and coos at the glimpse of a baby live here. Excavators and enormous cranes and dump trucks and cement trucks live here.
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Sunday, May 24th A load of laundry strewn across the guest bed, including all the winter socks I’d meant to bring with us. Dishes in the dishwasher, cleaned March 19th but mildewed by May 22. The pork chops we’d planned to have for dinner stuffed pell mell into the freezer. The parchment ponytails of
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Thursday, May 7th “Turn out the light?” Buffalo girls won’t you come out tonight “Turn out the light?” And dance by the night of the moon “Turn out the light!” The light is the sun. Perry wants it out at night, so he can sleep. I’m constantly explaining my own powerlessness. I can’t fix the
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Wednesday, April 15 Yesterday, it rained and rained. Sheets, sprays, steady drizzles. A warm rain, and when I ran on the wooded road that is really a long driveway, the forest was a conspiracy of greening pines and new ferns. A full-blown waterfall tumbled busily down the slopes. I thought of Bridge to Terabithia. Not
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Monday, March 30 I don’t know what a swallow looks like. A medium-small bird whose wings moved radially flew over the duck pond, and I’m calling it a swallow. I didn’t know wings moved like that, in those tight little circles. It was a poignant bird in a close sky. There’s a war on and
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Wednesday, March 18th There’s a passage in Rilla of Inglesidewhere Rilla’s companion, Mrs. Oliver, dreams about the upcoming Battle of Verdun. In the dream, a French soldier staggers up the veranda to where she stands. They shall not pass, he insists, over the peal of thunder and lashing rain. Rilla tries to take heart in
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Brady said we ought to keep a journal of this time, so when people ask, ten or thirty or fifty years from now, “what was it like,” we’ll be able to say: it was like [x]. Assume a susceptibility rate of y, and a transmission rate of n. Solve for x. It was like the
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A month ago, there was a murder on our block. The memory of the incident feels very fresh, still, and surreal in the way that events that you haven’t conceived of happening do. Our block is a longish one, but the murder happened only a few doors down, across the street from the playground where
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