Against the Current of the Moment, We Arrived
At eleven years old, I knew how to hold my own bag. I knew how to stay close to my parents. I knew how to listen without understanding, how not to cry when adults spoke over my head in a language that moved too fast. My family of nine had crossed the South China Sea...
We Walk a Figure Eight
Like a snowman, one of my twins suggests—looping first around the cracked basketball court and playground equipment, then the large parking lot where caregivers line up early, some in pickups, some in indistinguishable SUVs, one in a Cybertruck. Adults fall into phones as they wait to collect their middle schoolers
Zero
Today I am thinking that to be fat is to retain a vexing relationship with the number zero. This thought arrives with an egg in my hand. I am preparing an omelette and contemplating the mathematical representation of nothing, which at certain angles resembles the contour of the egg I am about to crack. There...
The Night Chorus
Sure, sex is great, but have you ever clocked out of a waitress shift on a night when everything went right instead of wrong and at the exact moment you’re pulling out of the parking spot you performed laborious geometry to fit into someone yells “I love your truck!” and you drive home with the...
Meditation on a Morning Commute
I must tell you that in the thick of autumn on a sixty-mile stretch of Michigan highway between my cold apartment and my dark office I’ve lost count of the number of mangled deer carcasses staining the concrete shoulder, whiplashed, eyes vacant, thin necks assuredly bent at some horrendous angle, clumps of bones and fur...
Hungry Because This World Is So Very Full
Across from the mountains, across from the fishing boat paused in the waves, waves like aluminum foil, across from the snowcaps too high to melt, and across from the peaks singing Climb us, climb us! Grab a grappling hook, across from the boat and the sushi it harvests: salmon rolls and dynamite rolls and dragons,...
How to Do Nothing
Choose a nice day. Or not, rain will do as well. Doing nothing is not meditation. You are not emptying your mind, you are letting it wander around from one thing to another while you sit still. Some people think of monkey mind as something to be conquered, or corralled, or even obliterated, but there...
This is How a Robin Drinks
The birdbath that gets the most action is accidental. It’s just a big plastic saucer forgotten on the driveway, but found and filled by summer storms. The dog loves it, the red wasps love it, as do robins, doves, and cardinals: birds comfortable on the ground. Between it and me are an old lawn chair...
The Wordless Woods
Foraging along the woods’ edge, the doe looks up from the hydrangea she is nibbling and twitches an ear—a salute, I think, stopping the car, though it isn’t a salute. She may be afraid for herself and the fawn with its muzzle in the mast, but shows no fear standing serene at the border of...
Butchering
I. “Butcher” has nearly disappeared from public use. Customers prefer “meat cutter” because they associate “butcher” with “slaughter” and therefore “cruelty.” My father was not a certified butcher. He learned the trade working with his brother in grocery stores when they were young. My father’s job consisted of cutting steaks and grinding hamburger meat and...
Bewildered Passengers
Although no adult had declared it off-limits, the trainyard gave off the creosote smell of the forbidden. The place felt dangerous, with grass tall as our thighs, insects buzzing, grasshoppers springing this way and that in the brittle summer heat. It was the kind of place where I always seemed to end up with Patrick....
Katy Perry Is Crooning and Won’t Stop Just Because I Did
Because this is a small village and people tell other people’s news, I already know when I walk past your mother’s house, and the garage door is flung open wide as if it got stopped mid-scream, and you are lining up the contents on the lawn (an artificial Christmas tree, boards that once belonged to shelves)...
Forgetting
You know how you find yourself in the kitchen and you can’t remember what you’re doing there so maybe you put your hands on the cold sink and look out the window but it doesn’t help? What works is to go back to the living room, sit down again on the chair you got up...
Everything is Relative
Earth in True Perspective, it promised. It was just another meme I clicked while eating breakfast, another instance in the history of fingertips finding meaning among unknown stars—Sirius and Pollux, Arcturus and Betelguese, Eta Carinae and Nebula—and with each click, the scale image of Earth was reduced to a gemstone, then a pinprick, then just...
Consciousness
Quick as a cut, darkness came to the afternoon, to the nursery where I sat cross-legged on the floor, a white raft of a blanket under us. My newborn sucked her fingers while clumped in the crooks of my arms. We both squinted toward the window, trying to make sense of it all: the sudden...
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