The Names We Keep Giving Each Other
My middle name is my great-aunt's first name, and her first name was her own grandmother's, going back further than anyone in my family can trace with any...
Read the pieceAuthor · Tessa Marchetti
I write A Home Filled With Love from the house I have kept for most of my life. Most of what I write about arrived here from somebody else's house first, and I would rather tell you the version with the mistake still in it.
The Porch on Halloween Night
There is a ceramic pumpkin on my porch railing with a hairline crack running from the stem down one side, glued back…
Getting the Photos Off the Phone and Onto the Wall
Scrolling my phone one evening, I realized four years of my children's photographs had never once been printed. Getting them onto the…
Getting Everyone to Actually Sit Down
For years dinner meant everyone eating in shifts, standing, or scattered through the house. Here is what it actually took to get…
The Watch That Stopped, and What I Did About It
My father's watch stopped running the week he died, which is the kind of detail that sounds invented when I say it…
What I Keep by the Front Door for Whoever Walks In
For years the space just inside our front door was nothing in particular, a stretch of floor between the mat and the…
The Five Minutes I Spend Sweeping a Porch That Was Already Clean
Most evenings the porch does not need sweeping at all, but the broom comes out anyway for the same five minutes, corner…
Patching the Quilt I Made Too Fast
I made a lap quilt in eleven days for a friend's surgery, rushing every seam, and spent the following year quietly fixing…
The Whistle My Father Used to Call Us In
My father had a whistle, two short notes and a longer one that dropped at the end, that he used to call…
The Week the Ornaments Go Back in Their Boxes
There is a shoebox in my attic held together with packing tape that is older than the tape itself looks like it…