Shortly after we moved, my daughter wrote to Santa Claus. She worried she’d be getting coal and whether Santa knew our new address. ‘I’ve been trying my hardest to be good,’ she explained, and thanked him for ‘what you are doing for me and other children.’ She was 11. She’s twenty-five now. Along with a …
Valentine’s Day is next month, but I want to tell you a love story. There’s a boy, yes. And a girl. And they are young, though they feel like adults. They have recently been separated but are now reunited, ablaze with certainty in themselves and their future together. When our story begins, they stand, improbably, …
As I write, Thanksgiving is a few days away, but I’m already listening to Christmas music while cross-stitching ornaments. Usually I wait until after Santa arrives in Herald’s Square to start prepping, but this year I started early. The ornaments take awhile, and the music… I credit my son. Recently, my daughter accompanied me on …
A wooden plaque containing the final two lines of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” used to hang in my classroom. Now, it adorns a shelf in my writing sanctuary at home. It is one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite poets. However, “The Road” is one of those poems that readers …
To give a thing a name, a label, a handle; to rescue it from anonymity, to pluck it out of the Place of Namelessness, in short to identify it—well, that’s a way of bringing the said thing into being. — Iff to Haroun in Salman Rushdie’s Haroun and the Sea of Stories This is the …
My Name was Supposed to be Elizabeth Ann 