Guess What? Turns Out, Other People Have Blogs too!
It may be a quiet summer in some places; down at our pond, though, two frogs have been really going at it. Vocally, I mean. They’re on opposite sides of the water, and—at least just about every time I go down there—they are carrying on a compelling conversation. One might even say it’s downright deep. Funny timing, actually, because one of my readers recently wrote me to ask if I’d participate in a “blog hop.” She prefers to call it … Read More
Polly, Proliferating
I had more or less gotten over the fact that I was not Joan of Arc, riding boldly on a horse smack into battle, when I discovered that my name—something that I had heretofore thought had distinguished me, at least slightly—was suddenly turning up all over the place. We aren’t exactly a field of dandelions, but my quality of Polly-ness, just as of this past week, has put me in a whole bouquet of other females. This has taken some … Read More
Saint Jeanne D’Arc? Ce n’est pas moi, non! Mais quand meme…*
I’ve gone months, even years, without giving ol’ Joan of Arc much thought, but then there she was astride her horse in the center of a glorious garden bearing her name on the edge of the Plains of Abraham in Quebec City. Maybe it was the cartoon I’d just seen, with a wife pointing out to her husband (or was it the other way around?) that he would never actually change the course of history; but meeting her in such surroundings … Read More
In the Fullness of Time, with A Better Chance
Do you think life is essentially made up of particular moments, like grains of sand that you can feel, grainy to the touch; or is it more about patches of days or even great swaths of years that bring about sweeping changes? One evening last week, I came home eager to tell my husband about some experiences I’d just had. Unfortunately— and this was nobody’s fault—other pressing matters got in the way. Believing that whatever I had to report was … Read More
Claiming Independence from the Indoor-Outdoor Divide, and Getting Some Religion too
It used to be that you could put things in different compartments and they would stay there, divided from one another in their own individual boxes. Nowadays, however— and this isn’t just in my house, either—certain things are getting mixed together in new ways. At first it can be a bit disorienting, like a kind of shift in the earth; but then it seems right and good. You look at your boxes again and wonder what else you can do … Read More
My Sports Cup Runneth Over
It was just about exactly a year ago that I drove my son and a carload of stuff down to register for Harvard Summer School. While in the parking search that is a perennial part of visiting there, we came upon an enormous protest taking place on the Cambridge Common. There was a sea of green and yellow and plenty of shouting through megaphones, most of it in Portuguese. People, entire families, kept arriving, walking vigorously towards the event. It … Read More
Tales Out of School
I remember once when I drove my sister-in-law to the airport, she got flummoxed with the overhead signs as we were coming in and thought we should get in the “Arriving” instead of the “Departing” lane. When I resisted, she laughed and said, “But I’m arriving for my flight!’ This is kind of the way it is with graduation ceremonies, isn’t it? “Commencements” are, of course, beginnings— or arrivals. And yet the whole experience always feels much more like, indeed … Read More
In Praise of Mud
Whoever said that Mud Season in New England goes from this time to that time and then is over definitely never lived here…or at least not near our back field. It was soaked when we arrived about a year ago, and it’s soaked again now. People in California, having to debate the rightness or wrongness of watering their lawns, would be envious. Besides seeing no end in sight to boot-wearing time, we’re getting plenty of opportunity to contemplate the many … Read More
Our Mothers, in Different Versions
Mother’s Day is supposed to be one of those “One Size Fits All” holidays, or at least that’s how the marketing forces would have it, but of course we know better. A day thus designated affects people in a whole range of ways. Anytime we’re supposed to feel any certain thing, there’s always a good chance we’ll feel something else entirely. The meaning of today, like snowflakes in an endless variety of configurations, falls on us differently depending on what … Read More
Sacrifices Come in All Shapes and Sizes
Easter is in the rear view mirror now, but I can’t shake the whole concept of sacrifice – giving up something for the sake of something else. Like a kind of shawl, it’s hanging around my shoulders. Only it’s not made of all the same material: I look to my right, and there’s a glowing warmth to the fabric…but turn the other way, and I see dark and threadbare material, offering no comfort at all. Can such different experiences really … Read More