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…
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 together so many autumns ago that I could n
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 wall took a habit, not a project.
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 us sitting at the same table.
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 out loud, but it is simply true. It sat in a…
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 coat closet where shoes piled up and mail
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 to corner, because the porch was never really the thing getting swept clean.
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 what I had gotten wrong the first time around.
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 us in from the yard or the field or wherever we had…
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 should be. Inside are six glass ornaments that b