Sorry for my recent silence—we just returned from nine days upstate New York. We spent the first week at my aunt’s cabin in the Adirondacks, then drove down to the Catskills for my closest friend’s wedding. There is nothing like leaving the Twin Cities and the day-to-day grind of life to put things back in…
Read MoreI’ve been feeling so stretched lately—juggling the two girls and work and life. D has been working long days, and sometimes I feel like screaming. (I did, in fact, scream in the car the other day when Zoë was wailing and Stella was whining. I just screamed, and I scared the sh*t out of Stella…
Read MoreLast night, Stella cried out in the middle of the night. When I went in to check on her, she was kicking around and couldn’t get comfortable. This didn’t surprise me. How could she possibly be comfortable when her bed was filled with baby dolls and stuffed animals? There was hardly any room left for…
Read Morewhen your lovely change of scene gets buried under 19 inches of snow? You stare out the window for hours cursing at the snow that will not stop falling. You become very crabby. Finally, you decide the only way to not go crazy is to actually go out into the blizzard. You try to pull…
Read MoreLast week was a sad week. A friend (the sister of very close friends of ours) died after struggling with depression and bi-polar disease for almost 20 years. Her son is ten years old, and every time I think of him, I get teary. Every time I think of her family and their pain, I…
Read MoreNow D. and Stella and I all have colds. We’re sick and snotty and coughing—my lungs and throat feel raw—and Stella has a wicked fever. When I was awake coughing from 1:30 to 4 this morning, I seriously considered a big shot of NyQuil. (I have a will of steel, so I was able to…
Read MoreI’m wondering what would happen if we could—and would—regularly imagine the lives of people, real people in our country and in our world, who live lives beyond our own experience. What would happen to our public policy, and foreign policy, if we didn’t seemingly lack the ability to imagine lives? It’s impossible, it seems, to…
Read MoreI just found out that one of my god-daughters has died. She got very sick and was gone in three days, from meningitis, I think, though this may have gotten lost in translation. I have only seen Deilis and her twin, Dailis, a few times since they were born, almost ten years ago. I flew…
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