I’m living in an alternate universe. Here I have no water view; it is cold and damp outside and not warm enough inside. There are dogs to be let in and out, dogs that make me wheeze. The cat doesn’t cuddle up to me like mine does. I sit and try to work on a small kitchen table where I can’t spread out my stuff because we will be using… Read More »Surfacing (with a nod to Margaret Atwood)
As I poured the remains of the Thanksgiving Day cranberry relish down the garbage disposal, I suddenly understood why people don’t like to cook. Weeks after the day I spent making homemade cranberry relish, two from-scratch (including the crust) pies, a turkey, mashed potatoes, noodle kugel , fresh haricot vert with sautéed almonds, I found the relish in the back of the fridge. It reminded me that I had spent… Read More »My Cooking Ambivalence
My 18-year-old daughter who is a freshman in college texted me the other day that she had a date for Saturday night. I texted her back that I thought college kids didn’t date. She replied that yes that was true and she had been complaining about it just the other day, when lo and behold she got an invitation to dinner out with a boy she knows. As far as… Read More »Love’s Labors Lost?
I was into my 30s before I began to tell the truth. I hadn’t exactly been lying in the three previous decades; but what I had been doing was, at best, dissembling, and at worst, well, let’s say I was avoiding the truth. And all the while I had no real idea I was doing it. I come from a family of liars. We didn’t know or tell the truth… Read More »At 50, Finally Telling the Truth
I was into my thirties before I began to tell the truth. I hadn’t exactly been lying in the three previous decades; but what I had been doing was, at best, dissembling, and at worst, well, let’s say I was avoiding the truth. And all the while I had no real idea I was doing it. I come from a family of liars. We didn’t know or tell the truth… Read More »There is Beauty in Truth
When my son was six years old and my daughter six months old my then husband and I moved to Oxford, England for his sabbatical year. I mentioned our trip to an acquaintance who appeared shocked. “I wouldn’t take my six month old to the supermarket, let alone a foreign country.” I had supportive friends and family, yes, but there were more nay-sayers than not. Even as recently as eighteen… Read More »You Might As Well Jump
From my desk, as I sit writing this, I can see the water: the Bull River out beyond a large marsh, the look of which changes depending on the tides. Off to my left is a small marina with a tiny cluster of sailboats and power boats; farther to the left still is the bridge to Tybee Island, the tip of which I can view out beyond the river. The… Read More »Alone, Again. Naturally.
Setting sail: my daughter and I chart new courses.
The other day I heard an extraordinary interview with Libyan writer Hisham Matar. His first book, In the Country of Men was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and he is an absorbingly poetic speaker. In the brief interview, Matar mentioned the kinds of things Libyan writers have for years been subjected to, including imprisonment and torture: in fact, shortly after Gaddaffi’s dictatorship began, the leader held a faux writers’… Read More »Treading Water
Five years ago, right before her seventy-eighth birthday, my mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The symptoms had been apparent for several years but alcohol masked some of them and denial, perhaps, masked others. Once my mother finally entered a rehabilitation facility and was no longer drinking, it became obvious that something was seriously wrong. Within weeks my sisters and I had cleaned out and sold her house and moved her… Read More »Do I Want to Know if I Will Come Down with Alzheimers?