This morning, Adam’s car wouldn’t start. This is no surprise. For the past six months, it’s needed a jump every week or so. A few weeks ago, we took it to the shop after trying for an aggravating half hour to get it to start (and finally succeeding), then left it there for five days over the New Year’s holiday. We thought it was a problem with the electrical in the car because the radio and dashboard lights have completely stopped working. A little research, and we figured out it’s a defect in …
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Missing the Christmas Magic
Earlier this month, I overheard my kids at the bottom of the stairs whispering about Santa. “Let’s stay up all night on Christmas Eve,” I heard Lily say. “Then we’ll see if he’s real.” Josh agreed, and the two of them concocted a plan – they’d stay up in shifts, promising that if Santa showed up they’d wake the other one. I stood in the hall upstairs and stuffed down a snort. Lily had already been no-so-subtly asking whether Adam and I are actually Santa Claus. “I know the parents really buy …
Home and Thanksgiving
The only time I ever went home for Thanksgiving was in college. I’m not sure it counted since my college was only twenty minutes from home and I stopped by almost every week. But I lived at the dorm and for Thanksgiving weekend, they kicked everyone out. So, I went home – back to my father and his old house, back to my bed. The house wasn’t all that old, but it felt it. It was built in the fifties – a four square that had never been updated. When my father first bought that house, the lady …
Here I Sit and Curiosity
Here I sit at my desk in the upstairs room. My husband just left for a hunting weekend, and we put our kids on the bus an hour ago. I did the dishes, vacuumed the dirty floors, and lit the candle I bought the other day when the house was hot and I couldn’t stand another minute of sitting in this upstairs room trying to write. This morning, I took a minute to read a few essays online that I had bookmarked, one of which suggested starting an essay with the words “Here I sit,” which seems as …
August Break
A few years ago, I got wind about this thing called The August Break. It was a blogging thing, a thing where you took a break from blogging for the month of August. Or, at least, a break from the writing part. You were still supposed to post a picture every day and let that picture hold space for your words. I spent the month doing just that, exhausted still from our move north and trying to figure out what blogging meant for me anyway. And I was trying to figure out what living back in New York …