Growing up, I shunned anything shaped like a heart, anything ruffled or bedazzled, anything pink. In the first two instances, my antipathy holds—unless the heart holds Godiva chocolates. But my own heart does a secret leap, like a kid embarrassed to love ballet and practicing in an empty room, whenever I find myself […]
The geranium is a Bette Midler sort, with a blowsy inflorescence of clustered pink blossoms tinged with pale orange. Irrepressible, she has stayed in full bloom since we brought her home more than a year ago. The New Guinea impatiens is just the opposite, a Maria Callas diva haughty about her […]
In the only recorded inter-species war in human history, the humans lost. Meet the victor. Skinny, leggy, frizzy-haired and feathered, with a long, pale blue neck, buggy amber eyes, and wings too short to fly. Instead, they flap when the emu runs, spindly legs blurring at thirty miles per hour. Emus may not […]
To know someone you love died trapped, their body scorched and melted by wildfire? To stand and watch a home that has been your sanctuary for thirty years burn to the ground? To then comb through the rubble and find nothing you can salvage, or worse, see an album of wedding photos so […]
Awful, that I had forgotten all about Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, wife of John F. Kennedy Jr. and killed alongside him in that horrific plane crash. She was thirty-three years old. Also stunning, and a former publicist for Calvin Klein. Now I read that in one of fashion’s weird spirals, she has become, posthumously, a […]
When Stephen Sondheim flew into town to accept the St. Louis Literary Award, my friend Lana Pepper, then president of the organization bestowing the prize, planned a dinner for him. Upon learning that Sondheim only drank vodka, Lana, the quintessential host, drove all over town in a frenzy, because the only vodka […]
It starts with a scritching noise that, like a demonic possession, seems to be coming from inside the walls. Then, anticlimax: we find a scattering of dark brown droppings in the bathroom cabinet. We are only dealing with Satan’s small gray minions. Andrew picks up a shredded pile of white cotton: “What’s this?” […]
A quarter-century ago, Wendell Berry suggested that if we aim to rescue our planet, “we are using the wrong language.” Our terms are scientific, expert, analytical—but also cold, and often vague. “As a result we have a lot of genuinely concerned people calling upon us to ‘save’ a world which their language simultaneously […]
Grinning, I requested Want, Gillian Anderson’s collection of women’s anonymous sexual fantasies, from our all-knowing small-town library. Why not? If a few were especially intriguing, I could read them aloud to my husband in a husky voice…. He saw the book on the kitchen table and snuck it away the next time he […]
A traditional Roman Catholic confessional looks as heavy as sin itself, the dark wood carved deep. You enter and kneel, but the kneeler never has quite enough room for your knees, which throws you off balance from the start. Velvet curtains rustle, then the metal grate slides open: God is listening. God, through […]
