When I was in college, I worked at a popular Mexican restaurant. Every Friday night, I’d watch my friend who was a cocktail server maneuver around the packed lobby delivering drinks to customers who were waiting to be seated. One day I asked her, “How do you carry those trays of drinks through all those...
After a year of pandemic isolation, you would think I’d have had enough of silence. As someone who is always “in her head,” I feel like during all this alone time I’ve cycled through just about every thought a person could have related to our current predicament, not to mention the state of the world,...
I’ve written often about hope in this blog. As you know, I believe it’s nearly impossible to sustain a life in the arts without it. And hope is certainly what continues to get us through the aftermath of 2020. Interestingly, it is my relationship to hope that has undergone the most change for me in...
I got my first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine this week. I was both excited and nervous, which is exactly how I feel about the concept of life going “back to normal.” For a year now, I’ve complained bitterly about pandemic-imposed isolation, boredom, separation, and loss. I’ve longed for the things I miss, like eating...
The historian in me thinks it’s important to mark the one-year anniversary of the pandemic. The writer in me would rather not. Maybe it’s insecurity – there are far better writers than me sharing their thoughts right now. Maybe it’s sensitivity – I’ve just started to bounce back from a really hard year and I...
It seemed to me many of my friends were feeling more down than usual the past couple of weeks. Blame it on the weather or the fact that Mercury was in retrograde or the ever-present worries about the pandemic. One of my friends apologized for “complaining,” saying that since I write novels about World War...
This week marks the seventh anniversary of this blog. Someone asked me how I had maintained the stamina for such an endeavor and how I came up with new ideas every week. I told her it all comes down to passion and permission. In 2014, friends had been urging me to start a blog for...
Every year we buy a live Christmas tree, although this past year, due to the pandemic, we did not. We’ve always patted ourselves on the back for taking our trees to be mulched after the holidays, but this year I read a blog post about holding on to your tree. The writer suggested propping it...
Brené Brown recently interviewed Dolly Parton on her Unlocking Us podcast. Dolly said two very different things that have been swimming around in my mind. The first was a comment about the pandemic. She said, “You can’t be too safe, but you can sure be too sorry . . .” Her second comment came in...
The way I’ve been feeling the past few months reminds me of having morning sickness. “Morning sickness,” by the way, is a misnomer. While it does often strike in the waking hours, it’s just as likely to hit you any time during the day when a certain sight, smell, or taste sets you off. At...