It’s safe to say that I had very little sense of self-preservation when I was younger. I was plagued by demons, doubts, profound questions about how to live a life worth living, symptoms I’m pretty …

The year that would never end began on January 5, 2009.
We didn’t know then what we know now: we were taking the first steps in a marathon. Had we, things might have been different. We …

I was too much a daughter to my father to know much about his career as a professor of the humanities, other than a few days I went to work with him as a kid.
But …

Last year, which we just kissed goodbye thank-you-very-much, was a difficult year. I know I’m not alone; uniformly, everyone I talk to suffered some horrible challenge last year, and maybe rose to meet it, or …

We have five chickens, all of them completely impractical birds. There’s one whopper and four midgets, smaller but less destructive as a result. Not from any lack of trying, though.
Gigi is the foster mother of …

Dad is now six months into “managing cancer.” He got his third hormone shot, the last in the keister which is probably a relief. Although now they’ll be giving him a shot in the stomach …

I lay in bed last night, tossing and turning with apparently little else to do, thinking about the internet and the propensity of people to abbreviate everything to get their point across. But I find …

The obligatory social functions one is committed to once you have a child are difficult for shut-in’s like myself. If I was childless, younger and spoke completely off the cuff, no problem: my outbursts might …

We’ve been in the grips of the holidays and just returned from a completely non-relaxing trip to California, about which I am trying to string together two sentences that mean much of anything. But I’m …

My husband wanted to revisit some of my finest work. Here is his favorite poem (I’ve probably written two, so it’s no high watermark) in its entirety. It is a haiku series. It is deep. …

“You have no idea what a pleasure it is to go to the bathroom,” Dad said. “A completely underrated experience.”
This is the sort of comment that peppers our conversations these days. We still talk about …

Our chicken story begins with gardening, as I suspect many urban chicken stories do. Over the last several years we have been shifting masses of soil and plants, sheets of asphalt, mountains of compost to …

The whole house is laid out this week. My nagging virus has turned into a she-beast of laryngitis; my husband keeps getting more and more work as the rest of the house falls apart around …

Our son was an early reader. This skill has raised some interesting issues as we were not given the luxury of either faking him out (he could read the newsletters the preschool sent home, where …