Expansion and Contraction
This year, instead of a storm, I got trapped at home for two weeks by pneumonia. My world shrank to the size of my bedroom and, for some unpleasant number of hours, a gurney in the emergency department.
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An Inauspicious Beginning
The triage nurse bumped me to the front of the pack when my heart rate measured 145, which is about the top of the range for someone my age doing aerobics. I had not so much as walked around the block in four days.
Climbing the Walls
It’s January in Oregon, and raining relentlessly. The Christmas decorations are gone, the tree and its ornaments boxed and in the attic. At this writing, my son is under the weather with a cough that won’t seem to abate, partly because he is asthmatic. We are treating the
The Year in Binges
2025 was a year of emotional streaming and emotional eating. My husband and I are both despondent and outraged over what’s been happening to our country, which may be one reason why he always comes back from the grocery store with cartons of ice cream. We snack a lot
Be Seen, Be Heard
I’ve been teaching myself piano for three years, and I’ve noticed something about the way I play. My fingers tend to approach the keys from an oblique angle, almost coming at them from the side rather than from above. They do not land with confidence; they approach timidly,
Merry Christmas from the Midcentury
Long after I stopped believing in Santa, but was still a kid, there was a magical visitor to my suburban neighborhood that I looked forward to every Christmas. It was a caroling wagon: some kind of motorized vehicle, blurry in my memory, that was draped with lights and ridden by
Belief in Magic and Fear of Failure
On cognitive distortions in parenting
No Monkeys. Still a Circus.
I’m on a videoconference call at work when my cat suddenly jumps onto my desk, entering the frame seemingly from nowhere, superimposing his head or tail onto the graphic background I use to shield my drab office space from view. He startles me, because I sit with my back
Sing-a-Long Mommy
I love to sing. I’ve got a large bank of songs in memory, and every day I come across something that evokes a line or a melody. It’s hard for me not to vocalize what tickles my brain at that moment. My husband uses the phrase “our house”
The Games We Play
In 2017, a girlfriend and I went to visit our mutual bestie in Colorado. We drove through the Rockies, drank microbrews, ambled along the pedestrian mall in Boulder, and visited the Denver Botanical Garden. In downtown Denver, we stopped by a game store to look for a new board game