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.
Topic
Musings and Memoir
A collection of 34 posts
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
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
Second Acts
I wouldn’t mind being Ina Garten in my next life—a queen of simple, delicious cooking and entertaining whom Tina Fey suspects is only a figment of middle-aged women’s collective imagination. I’ve watched Ina’s cooking shows for years and just finished reading her memoir. She’
At the River
I went to the river alone. I’d asked my kid if he wanted to come with, and he didn’t, which might have been the best outcome that day. I needed quiet.
It was a short drive from my house, and a short walk out of the parking lot
Letter to a Tree
Letter to a tree at Sue-meg State Park, Trinidad, CA:
I apologize that I’m not sure what kind of tree you are, although I studied many of your brethren in college forestry and botany classes. You remind me of a cypress. You sat, and presumably still reside, near