They’re over here on the sofa passed out in their prom dresses. My friend Molly’s observation came in her familiar silken contralto voice at the other end of the phone line, and made me giggle. It was time to go retrieve my toddler from an afternoon play date with hers just a few blocks away, and it sure sounded like it had been a good … Continue reading Reflection: You Can Never Go Home
I am sitting in a nail salon at a small, round table with a fan trained on my outspread fingernails, which are painted an appealing shade of pale aquamarine. There are three little piles of business cards in holders on the table, and because the staff seem intent on torturing me with this obscenely long drying ritual, I have plenty of time to scrutinize them. … Continue reading Christmas 2025, in the Books
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. ― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms There was … Continue reading Reflection: No Use Crying
Over the course of the long holiday weekend I have fairly devoured this novel by Catherine Newman, whose main character and plot resonate with me in 10,000 kinds of ways. The setting for her story is a favorite summer vacation rental on Cape Cod where the protagonist-narrator, a menopausal mom, has returned for a week (the standard annual stay) with her husband and now-grown children, … Continue reading Reflection: Can We at Least Finish This Thing?
Honey-golden, irregular cleaving, sticky, crunchy underfoot crust born of pine sap. The small rectangular wood rosin box tucked into a corner of the massive classroom, toted to the stage for theatre week, at once shimmering and powdery. Pliant dancer feet squeezed like gloved hands into satiny pointe shoes ripped, broken, and pieced back together just so, the shod feet standing in the box, wiggling around, … Continue reading Sensorial Memory: Inside Mom’s Dance Bag
Sitting on the screen porch in my Adirondack chair a couple of weeks ago, wrapped in a fleece blanket, I felt like somebody must’ve on an oceangoing ship in the last century, reclining in one of those graceful wood steam liner chairs. Maybe it wasn’t quite warm enough to be outside on the deck, so the attendant came around with a blanket and some hot … Continue reading Reflection: Good Neighbors and Bad, and Even Famous Ones
I read a quote recently that goes something like, people who knew the older version of you would not recognize who you are now. This might be true, although I believe a person’s essence never changes, and by that I mean, warts tend to hang around—but so does what’s good in each of us, I think, and the good can even blossom if we let … Continue reading Through the Lens: A Rare Glimpse Into an Old Version of Me
“See that tree line on the ridge up there?” I shade my brow with one hand and squint into the late afternoon sunlight to look, our last afternoon in daylight saving time. Tomorrow morning we’ll wake to an earlier sunrise and a shorter day. “Yep.” “Now look to the right. See where the trees are missing?” Against the fiery orange western sky, the ridgeline hovers … Continue reading Reflection: O, Asheville
Not too long ago I ordered a subscription to The New Yorker, the three-dimensional paper version. It’s just one of many gifts to myself in recent years that represent an attempt to regain ‘wholeness’ after the financial ruination that marked the end of my first marriage in 2012. I’m savvy enough to know there’s much from that long chapter I’ll never have, or get to … Continue reading Reflection: The Singular Joys of a Paper Magazine Subscription
When I was a young student of archaeology, I recall being gobsmacked by the notion that the curvaceous Tennessee River had changed its course again and again over millennia and the one I knew, the one whose bluff I lived on for roughly a decade and where my kid spent the first few years of his life, probably looked radically different from the river native … Continue reading How a Control Freak Deals With Nature
Carolina Thinklings 