It’s possible you’re already doing it, whatever your it is. Or that you’ve already done it in some past variation. It’s a matter of continuing to do the hard thing you thought you could never do.Breathing always helps. Find someone who reminds you how to take deep breaths when it feels like you’re sucking in [...]
A seemingly innocent email from the United States Postal Service when we moved: Do you want to sign up for Informed Delivery? Sure, I thought, it will be nice to know what’s coming. Every day, I open an email with photos of what’s arriving (or not arriving) in my mailbox that day, a scanned digital [...]
In case you’re wondering, our garden is still growing weeds. I’m learning that this is how it goes (so they say): you pull the weeds, they’re gone; then the weeds grow back, and you’re down in the dirt again. My mom hands me my new gardening gloves, tells me to get back to pulling weeds. [...]
The two best friends know this already, in fact, they’ve had more than 60 years of learning that there are things you just can’t plan for, like how many days you’ll spend playing nurse after the other recovers from surgery, for instance, but this one, well, this one is a new one: spending the day [...]
Every month, I hope that I will wake up changed, a new woman, suddenly transformed into the thoughtful person I want to be—the friend who remembers birthdays. It’s sort of like how every day, my cat climbs on the back of my reclining zero gravity chair on my porch. And every day, she hopes that [...]
Today she gets to decide: push the vacuum up and down, or side to side? How does she want it to turn out? It's entirely up to her. She could even do a mix of both patterns, longways and sideways (if she wants) because she has complete power over the outcome. With every push and [...]
My mom suggests we make poop cookies, a family name for chocolate oatmeal no-bakes. I agree, give her a slight smile and a "Yeah" (the best I have to offer right now). It's a hard week (a hard month) (a hard year). She's inside my kitchen pantry taking inventory of what's in stock in our [...]
“Why are you using a good Sharpie pen to write a grocery list?” my husband asks. “Because I like how it writes,” I say. “Why waste a good pen?” “I care about how the grocery list looks.” (Why would I not select a smooth pink pen?) “Here, this is the pen,” he suggests, grabbing a [...]
My husband (who affectionately calls me the Laundry Fairy) says his socks are missing. I remember hearing tales of lost socks from others who were living in a different chapter and carried far heavier loads than I did as a single person. Where could it have possibly gone? I always wondered. (How did your life [...]
A man in a red shirt drives a blue tractor through our neighboring green field. Our black-and-white cat sleeps under my chair, while the gray-spotted cat’s busy hunting a cardinal. An orange popsicle to cut through the thick July heat. If I look hard enough, I see more than the black that paints all of [...]
ashley fenker 