Category: Motherhood
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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 a notebook, ostensibly mine, though seventy-percent full of patriotically-colored maps, courtesy my older son. The maps are loop-de-loops, whorls. Not recognizably places, though mostly contiguous. The fury within me — it might, if I tried to draw it, look like these maps. Or it might be a scrawl that builds upon itself until the off-white page becomes inexorably minked, along with the pinky edge of my hand.
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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.
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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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Don’t believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty nature is
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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But No Queen Comes
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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School Ties (or, the Campus Novel as a Counterfoil to Yet More Motherhood)
One of those heady, grey days. Wind gusts up to 55 miles per hour. The maple leaves outside my room are dancing like mad. The little kids at the school behind me have finished recess; the bigger ones at the school across the street are still going strong. It’s loud — a torrent of yips […]
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