“Back straight, feet on floor, fingers on home keys, three-two-one-and-type!” Sister Lorraine timed our drills with military ferocity. Except for the morning my friend Jenny cracked open the classroom door and sent a little wind-up Woodstock clattering across the floor, headed straight for the nun shoes. All that tension Sister created on […]
Ours is a house divided. On the bright side, at least we are not running at each other screaming vitriol and kicking and clawing until we are (reluctantly) dragged apart so someone can lift a T-shirt for Jerry beads. On my husband’s side of the house, Jerry Springer deliberately performed a public service […]
If we were climbing Mount Everest’s Khumbu Icefall, sucking thin air into lungs near collapse, blind to anything but the chance to stand at the top of the world, our sherpa would give us the classic warning: pause every third day, and “let your soul catch up to your body.” We are not, however, […]
“Drain the swamp” just sounded like something Donald Trump would yell, so in all those years of wincing, I never questioned its origins. But now that the nation again faces the possibility of Trump stuffing himself into presidential blue instead of an orange jumpsuit, my mind returns to that hated phrase. Did it come to […]
It was May 16—had there been enough sun to warm the water? Someone saw the old man climb onto the old Daniel Boone Bridge railing—however did he manage it?—and leap into the Missouri River. As his body shot deeper, the chill and darkness would have enclosed him. Was he still conscious? Still glad […]
In anguished tones, my husband recites the names of all the characters slain in Star Trek: Picard. One after another, killed needlessly and deliberately. Is this laziness or sadism, he wants to know. He blames Game of Thrones. I am nodding in sympathy, wondering if the potatoes are done. Later, though, his […]
During the pandemic, staunch botanists hung “Essential Worker” signs on the big, gracious trees that line Washington University’s Danforth Campus. Consider the oxygen, the shade, the cleansing of the air, the shelter for insects, the feeding of squirrels, the holding of the soil…. The more I learn about trees, the guiltier I […]
Cast your mind back to the Friday before tax day. No doubt you have properly submitted your forms and already received a refund, but our new tax preparer is still working on our taxes. She is not the tax preparer who was warmly recommended, but someone he called in to help. […]
Love at first sight, without knowledge or experience—is it possible? Safely, with art. I loved John Singer Sargent’s Portrait of Madame X the instant I saw it. The subject, I imagined as a coolly aristocratic Frenchwoman in her early thirties. The artist was a man half in love with her—and half in […]
How I yearned to be a fiction writer. Not to write fiction, mind you. Not to invent plots or breathe life into characters. I much preferred digging around in the real world. No, what I wanted was for a literary editor to take me to lunch. In New York. Someplace with white tablecloths. In […]