Sing, O muse, of the lumbering opossum, of the nearsighted, stumbling opossum, whose only defenses are a hiss, a hideous scowl and a rank scent emitted in terror. Let us rejoice in the pink-nosed, pink-fingered opossum, her silvery pouch full of babies, each no bigger than a honeybee. (more….)
The gift of springtime is the panoply of new life: gray buds breaking open into bright flowers, gray branches sprouting leaves in a thousand shades of green to make a bower of our common lives. In the treetops, birds throw back their heads to sing their full-throated, body-shuddering songs. (more….)
Like many girls of my generation in the rural South, I learned every form of handwork my grandmother or great-grandmother could teach me: sewing, knitting, crocheting, quilting. I even learned to tat, a kind of handwork done with a tiny shuttle that turns thread into lace. Some of my happiest memories are of sitting on the edge of my great-grandmother’s bed, our heads bent together as she pulled out my mangled stitches. (more….)
When my mother died in 2012, she left behind a huge collection of memorabilia. Not just the usual love letters, family photographs and cherished recipe cards but also random items that almost no one else bothers to save. Things that meant something to her but whose meaning she never explained to me. (more….)
The scruffy little dog of indeterminate origin — she’s either a beagle mix or a terrier mix, depending on which veterinarian is guessing — reaches the end of the driveway and sits down. A gentle tug on the leash merely inspires the dog to lower herself completely, her face on her front paws. A treat offered in exchange for progress on this “walk” yields no better results. (more….)
It would be fair to call my home décor aesthetic the opposite of a Pottery Barn catalog. In theory, I would love to live in a Pottery Barn catalog, but in practice, I’m too much of a pack rat to be comfortable among spare furnishings in rich earth tones. Our house looks like an ongoing estate sale. (more….)
In the search for comfort in the face of so many 21st-century dangers — to democracy in the age of fake news, to the natural world in the age of climate change — I don’t normally think of winter as offering much in the way of consolation. (more….)
All fall, in random hours, I’ve been looking for my great-grandmother’s recipe for corn cakes. I have a perfectly serviceable recipe for everyday cornbread, but it’s nothing like those corn cakes I find myself returning to in memory. (more….)
Leaf blowers are like giant whining insects that have moved into your skull. They are swarming just behind your eyes, drilling deep inside your teeth. Leaf blowers have ruined autumn with their insistent whine and their noxious fumes, and they are everywhere. (more….)
For decades, my grandmother was the caretaker of a gangly, disorganized houseplant with nothing, so far as I could see, to recommend it. The plant was ugly, an awkward tangle of greenery fashioned from what seemed to be spare botanical parts: long stems that reached out in a vaguely threatening way and generated new stems, randomly, from within their own stretching expanses. As a little girl, I thought it might bite me. (more….)
