Shadow

October 27, 2008

A few years ago, my friend Madge told me that I should be reading Billy Collins. I don’t read much poetry – Rilke and Neruda are favorites, along with Mary Oliver and Amy Lowell and a handful of others. But she’s good at spotting books I might like, so I trusted her about this, too. […]

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1966

October 23, 2008

The woman in the photo to the right is my grandmother, and my grandfather is behind her. They are standing at the front of a church in August of 1966, at the wedding of their oldest son. My father was 21. My mother was 19 and pregnant with my sister. I don’t presume to know […]

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Lucky

October 21, 2008

In the space of an hour last Saturday, two things happen. First, I meet a woman whose last name is Lucky, and then I draw my own name out of a basket full of small slips of paper and win a lovely bracelet as a door prize. What are the odds? I’ve gone my whole […]

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Static

October 17, 2008

Just now, five minutes ago, I gave up on a post I was trying to write, turned off the lights, gave Girl a t-shirt of mine to sleep in because she was hot in her pajamas, climbed in beside her and set the alarm. And then. I realized there were maybe one or two things […]

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Faded

October 8, 2008

Today, I was a woman just hanging on. The day went downhill pretty early – like it was some pissed off teenage girl who set up a lawn chair and a cooler, got real comfortable, and derided me and muttered expletives for the next 12 hours. A heckler, with time to kill. “You’re crazy,” she […]

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The sweet spot, with a side of ice cream

September 26, 2008

Sometimes it’s in the way they look at me, and sometimes in what they say, but every so often I catch my kids trying to get the drop on what it’s like to be an adult. “You get to stay up however late you want. It’s not fair.” or “When I’m a grown up, I’ll […]

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Answer

September 19, 2008

I was in the middle of nowhere, but I felt as though I had arrived at someplace important and pivotal. A place that should show on some map of my life with the words Go here. Heavy and golden, the moonlight sank to earth on a parachute of stars and brought everything around me out […]

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Answer

September 19, 2008

I was in the middle of nowhere, but I felt as though I had arrived at someplace important and pivotal. A place that should show on some map of my life with the words Go here. Heavy and golden, the moonlight sank to earth on a parachute of stars and brought everything around me out […]

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The one where she loses her PG-13 rating…

September 15, 2008

So the other day in the car, 7 year old Girl pipes up with, “I just saw two pigeons in love. They were hurting each other – that’s how you know they’re in love.” NPR couldn’t top that, so I turn down the radio. A few thoughts go through my head: A) It’s time for […]

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Empty

September 11, 2008

It feels like self-hypnosis, what I’m doing. In order to move my pen forward, my mind has to go back, even further back than the small paragraphs in my head that I’ve used for so long to say what happened back then. This is different. It has to be different. To tell the truth of […]

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