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A couple of days ago, my instructor explained how we’d be doing things differently “because of Covid.” “Ah, ‘because of Covid’,” I said. “The crappiest words in the English language.” “Are they really, though?” another student asked. “I could think of worst things we could say.” She was right, of course. Words are just words...
This post originally ran on January 12, 2019 Every month, our local thrift store calls and asks if we have any donations, and every month we say, “Sure, we’ll leave a bag on the porch for you.” It forces my husband and I to walk through our entire house every 30 days, dig through all...
This holiday season, – our second in pandemic times – there are fewer parties, fewer trips to the minimally stocked stores, fewer visitors, etc. But one thing that has not changed is that two of our local radio stations are playing nothing but holiday songs, and that certainly helps bring in some yuletide cheer. When...
I was listening to an episode of Poetry Unbound, a podcast hosted by Padraig O Tuama who is definitely a person I’d love to have at my dinner party. He mentioned that in Irish when you talk about emotion, you don’t say, “I am sad.” You say, “sadness is on me.” You don’t become the...
Let me see if I can articulate this correctly: Feel into this phrase, “I don’t care anymore.” Did you experience tension or relief? Most of us associate this declaration with something “bad.” When someone says it, we immediately jump into nurturing mode. “Oh, you don’t mean that,” we say. We search for ways to cheer...
I recently came across an exercise where you write a letter to your younger self. I chose to write to myself at age 15 when I was full of teenage angst and bursting with ambition and struggling to contain other emotions that felt like they could tear me apart. As soon as I started the...
When I was very young, my brother and I were watching the Jerry Lewis telethon on Labor Day weekend. The local news station had a big fish tank set up outside a hotel and was asking people to come drop off change to help the telethon. My brother and I begged my mom to drive...
I was chatting with an artist friend the other day whose career is taking off. I complimented her by saying she’d done everything right over the years in terms of following all the steps to achieving her desired career and being patient with the process. She said something to the effect that it wasn’t hard...
I’ve been failing at my sabbatical. That’s the word I’ve been choosing to describe this period of stepping back from the work for which I once felt such devotion. It sounded like a more romantic word than “break” and a less confusing term than “gap year” and a less dramatic designation than “mid-life crisis.” It...
The other night at a local concert, singer-songwriter Maia Sharp talked about a conversation that took place when her long-term relationship was coming to an end. Her partner said, “You’re gonna make a nice girl miserable someday.” Maia must have gotten a certain look on her face, because her girlfriend then added, “Oh my God....