April 24, 2012 – 11:57 am
Ten years ago, my birthday. I am visiting a friend in New Hampshire. It is unseasonably cold for early October; already, less than two hours north of our Boston suburb, frost has ravaged gardens, stolen the life out of all the flowers in the big planters downtown. While my friend is at work, I spend the day wandering through her town. Peterborough is just half an hour away from where I grew up, but it feels further, thanks in large part to the mountain in between, the harsher climate over here. When I was a child, we rarely came in…
Her doctor told her she had, at best, two years to live. That was nearly twenty-five years ago, when Kathy Rich learned that after a brief remission, her stage four breast cancer had returned. My friend Jamie Raab knew Kathy and I would hit it off, and she was right. Last summer, when I went to spend a weekend at Jamie’s country house in upstate New York, she arranged for Kathy to come, too. The day we spent together was a scorcher; ninety-eight degrees in the shade. But the heat didn’t stop Kathy from suggesting that we hop in the…
February 20, 2012 – 10:44 am
“You have to admit, this is an indulgence,” my husband says, as we walk across the windswept campus to meet our son. We’ve flown all the way from New Hampshire to Minnesota, just to watch the last performance of a production of “A Chorus Line.” The way I see it: going out to dinner is an indulgence. Buying jewelry or a new pair of boots is definitely an indulgence. Raspberries in February, yes. But taking a couple of days off and flying halfway across the country to watch our son realize his life-long dream of being a musical director —…
February 14, 2012 – 12:23 pm
The theme of my life this winter can be summed up in a word: practice. Two-thirds of the way through a memoir, with another four chapters to go and a deadline less than two months away, I have made a commitment to writing practice. But I am a slow writer, never certain of the way forward, and so I have no choice but to practice patience. Waiting for words to come, trusting that if I stay here long enough, the next sentence will find its way home to me, requires a certain kind of faith. Faith in mystery and faith…
February 5, 2012 – 8:33 pm
We sat around the kitchen table after dinner last night — my son Henry, my husband Steve, and two of our dearest friends in the world, Lisa and Kerby. I met Lisa eighteen years ago, when Henry visited her kindergarten classroom for the first time as a small, shy four-year-old. He already had an IEP from the public school system and a medical file that was two-inches thick. He’d been diagnosed with asthma at three months, sensory integration dysfunction and low muscle tone at two, and various other physical and developmental delays and concerns ever since. He saw an occupational…
