“Bad news,” wrote my friend Natalie, in a g-chat a couple of weeks ago. “Mercury isn’t even in retrograde yet.” We’d had a conversation the day before about the challenges, the kinks and quirks, the general weirdness of the year thus far. We’d speculated that there must be some sort of cosmic explanation for all [...]
When I was little, I thought hiccups could be captured in a tiny invisible box. I believed that if I thought hard enough—imagined myself sitting on the box, and nailing it shut, and applying a layer of glue, and locking it tight—they could be smothered, extinguished, conquered. I also believed that the food on my [...]
We sat in a circle on the first day of ballet class, thirty-or-so adults on the floor. Our teacher was a lovely woman with the sort of soothing presence you’d hope for in an introductory-level dance class meant for grown-ups, and she’d asked each of us to share three things with the group: our name, [...]
There were earthquakes in Tokyo the night before I left for Cambodia. It was the summer after I’d graduated college and I planned to spend a month overseas, teaching English to a small group of children at an orphanage in Phnom Penh. My family accompanied me half of the way there, vacationing at my grandparents’ [...]
When I first moved to New York City five years ago, I lived in a tiny apartment in Morningside Heights, in a bedroom with a single window that looked out onto a brick wall. Because I craved sunlight (a luxury I’d always taken for granted), and because my work-from-home schedule allowed me a certain degree [...]
Over dinner this week, my sister-in-law (Calla’s mother, and a fellow writer) and I discovered that we share a common fear: the bedtime story. “Tell me a story,” Calla will say on nights when I babysit. She’ll look at me imploringly, tucked in her bed alongside her stuffed warthog and plush pygmy lemur. This is [...]
A couple of months after my niece, Calla, was born, my brother and sister-in-law sent a photo of her on a sheepskin rug, staring straight into the lens with wild, wide green eyes. I was still in New Zealand, living in my front-yard trailer, when the photograph arrived in my email inbox. “She’s switched on,” [...]
I landed on the North Island of New Zealand in November 2008. I was alone, except for a mammoth North Face backpack, stuffed to capacity with Dr. Bronner’s peppermint soap and two dozen chocolate-chip Clif Bars. I planned to spend the next four weeks by myself, farm-hopping, if you will, as a participant in an [...]
