- Proust, you can have your madeleine.

Our friends were away on vacation, and Lydia was in charge of the cat and fish. She promised to daily feed and water the cat and clean its litter and occasionally to drop a few beads of food into the fish bowl.
One night I helped, and on another night — the last night of cat [...]

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- I surrender.

An ultrasound technician called me “laid-back” yesterday. This seemed, at the moment, not unlike other things people have called me, like “calm” or “safe.”
I could turn this into a boast, I suppose, but I’m not here to write about compliments. It does seem interesting to write about what it feels like, to me, to be [...]

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- Sew peace

You could buy this from soleilgirl’s Etsy shop:

Or make something like it. A little felt, a bit of thread, a steady hand to cut and sew.
Link via whipup.

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- Needles and activism

The knitters at Stitch for Senate are making helmet liners for every member of the U.S. senate in order to engage “with public officials about the war in Iraq.”
This puts me in mind of Eyes Wide Open, an exhibit of boots and shoes, representing military men and women killed in the Iraq War, that we [...]

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- Crow season

Jan sent me a link announcing new work by Vermont artist Carol MacDonald, in which she “examines the tradition of knitting through a variety of print-making techniques.“  I love it, especially that the featured image is “Red Skein I.”  (What is it about red yarn?)
I looked deeper into MacDonald’s portfolio and found even more that [...]

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- Destination: insight

In the car on the way to work, I was thinking through a demanding e-mail that I received. The sender or nature of the e-mail is not so important. We all get them occasionally. Someone wants something from you, and you start thinking about how to satisfy them, to give them what [...]

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- Prompted by snow

The view of snow out of a second floor window into our backyard reminds me of other times, in other winters, I’ve stood at the same window and looked out on the same view. These linked memories seem to collapse time and heighten the present moment.

Yesterday I was the first adult home, and I dug [...]

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- Garden for our times

Do you remember the walled, overgrown garden brought back to life by a boy and a girl in F. H. Burnett’s Secret Garden (1911)? The book was a favorite of my childhood, and perhaps the long, restorative story about gardening has something to do with my own attraction to shabby, abandoned patches, as if glory and [...]

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- Little house moment

Saturday: rain, finally.
There was one quiet period when Lydia was at Mandarin Gourmet, having lunch with her friends; Eli was at John’s house, doing some mysterious thing that teenage boys do, fueled by Vitamin Water and cheddar cheese potato chips; and Jimmy was at Roche Brothers, getting provisions.
Grace and I were home, quietly puttering around. [...]

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- Slow down, you move too fast…

It is customary for Tom Cavanagh, the principal of the K-8 school in Brookline that Grace and Lydia attend and Eli graduated from, to begin his frequent e-letters to the school community with a quotation and a short thoughtful essay. This one hit my Inbox on a day in which I, and everyone who works [...]

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