Or: Why the Urge to Begin Again on the First Day of Fall Is Not in Your Imagination Every year, on the first day of fall, I find myself doing something that has nothing to do with summer ending and everything to do with starting over. I clear the desk. I buy a new journal….
On legacy, love, and the generational wealth that cannot be put in a will. I have been thinking about inheritance lately. Not in the way most people mean the word. When most of us hear “inheritance,” we think of something tangible. Money. A will. The contents of a house, divided and distributed. And yes, that…
The small, repeatable things that make the autumnal equinox and the whole season feel like yours Every year it comes as a small surprise, this feeling, even though it arrives the same way every time. The temperature has not changed. But the light has, just barely. A tilt in the late afternoon that was not…
As many of you know from my posts last week, my stepfather Gary passed away, and I have been sharing and navigating that here on the blog. If you missed those posts, you can read A Life Well Lived and Liminality: The In-Between. Grief does not keep a schedule. Your world stops, but the world…
Yesterday morning the call came. It’s time. My mom jumped from bed and raced to the hospital. My sister was already there. And then, Gary being Gary, he stayed. Perhaps he still had unfinished business. Perhaps there were people he wanted to see one more time. Whatever the reason, all day long friends and family…
There will be no book this week, no outfit, no movie, no walk report. Not today. I am writing this with a broken heart. I told you last week that my stepfather had gone into hospice. The doctors were quick to say it is not like the hospice of old, not the kind where the…
There is a moment most of us have lived. You walk into a room (a book club, a neighborhood gathering, a work meeting, a family holiday dinner) and you can feel it before you can name it. The temperature in the room is set by one woman. She decides who gets warmth and who gets…
A few rainy days, the 6 a.m. world, a novel worth staying up for, and a filmmaker you need to know The rain came. It came for a few days in a row, and there is something about rain after months of dry, scorching heat that feels like an exhale you have been holding since…
A quiet word for women who have been making themselves smaller for a very long time I do not remember when I started doing it. Making myself smaller. Quieter. Easier. Taking up less space at the table, not literally, but in every way that matters. Softening an opinion before I had even finished thinking it….
I did not know that I would lose words. Not the ability to speak. The actual words. A particular word I needed (the name of a restaurant, the title of a book I had read twice, the word for the thing I was holding in my hand) simply not there. Gone. As if someone had…
A letter to every woman holding someone else’s world together I have been watching the women in my life lately. Not in a casual way. In the way you watch someone when you realize they have stopped sitting down. My mother is caring for my stepfather. My sister is caring for her husband, who has…
On Midlife, Contentment, and the Permission to Love the Life You Actually Have Last week a friend and I were sitting on the front porch taking in the flowers blooming in the circle, watching the bees and birds flit from one to the other. And she said, “I keep waiting to feel like I’ve arrived,…
