The café owner had already called my dog ugly when the stranger beside me asked him one question. “Tell me, Christopher… does the name Victoria mean anything to you?” Christopher […]
My grandmother Ruth believed that the things you did quietly were the truest things about you. She said this to me when I was twelve years old, sitting at her […]
There is a specific quality to the grief of not knowing. It is different from the grief of loss. Loss has an end to it, a bottom, a place where […]
There are things you keep private in a marriage not because they are shameful but because they are yours. Not every good thing needs to be shared with the world […]
There is a specific kind of parent pride that does not know what to do with itself. It is not the pride of the recital or the report card or […]
Only the handwriting was not mine. I leaned closer until the blue-white glow of the laptop made my eyes ache, staring at a signature that tried to imitate the way […]
There is a particular sound that airports make at five in the morning. It is not silence. It is the absence of the sounds that will come later. The hollow […]
My mother has never wasted anything in her life. Not food. Not time. Not money. Not the specific energy it takes to impress people who are not worth impressing. I […]
My husband Martin has two expressions that I have learned to read the way you learn to read weather after living in the same place for a long time. The […]
Some people understand rain differently depending on where they grew up. I grew up in a small house in Decatur, Illinois, where rain was practical and annoying and occasionally flooding, […]