I have been gone a long time, holding my breath. Here is my first blog back in a year: Clumps of wet snow clog the landscape. Limbs of aspens, not yet fully leafed, bend over with the weight. June 1st and the world outside my window is heavy with snow. After one of the driest winters I can remember, I welcome this late winter with open arms, luxuriating in wetness, grateful for this small reprieve.…
“One must have a mind of winter” –Wallace Stevens I learned what it means to be human at the hands of winter. It came to me in a bleak time, when I’d retreated to a cabin in the Rocky Mountains to live alone with my dog, after a series of gut-punching losses that triggered dread for each dawning day. It was February—for me, the darkest month of the year, a month so brittle and cold,…
A month after Greg and I hauled our household 38.4 miles south and west, we are still settling in. Our couches are stuck somewhere in California and we have been walking around boxes and paint cans for weeks. Our living room serves a staging ground for unpacking and sorting, and also as the dog’s other, bigger bedroom. It’s been a month of figuring out where things will go and non-stop organizing—Doing it right, I say,…
Home is my great white whale. For as long as I can remember I’ve searched for it, turned the thought of it over in my mind and longed for the coordinating x and y of permanence and thriving for the perfect place. Growing up, I wanted to be from somewhere, but my family, kicked around by my father’s Air Force career, tumbled from state to state. Back then, home was neither a haven nor the…