Category: Motherhood
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More like a particle or more like a wave
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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some poetic shock of intensity
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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She wasn’t just curious. She was planning this the whole time.
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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Then he picked up his rain coat, turned around, and went to hell
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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Put the circle back
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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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…
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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…
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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. Read more
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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…
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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…
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