Tag: home
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Nursery Dreaming
Our house has a hallway that leads to a nursery. For many, this is an ordinary sentence. For us, it’s extraordinary. We bought a house down a quiet lane from a man who doesn’t believe in hallways. He called them corridors. “I don’t believe in corridors,” he said. I have never forgotten it. I spent…
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I Need to Know How Many
It’s the middle of 2020 and I’m writing a grocery list for my husband. He has been shopping for our groceries since the day we all realized how people sneeze all over carts then abandon it for the next set of gullible hands. Sometimes I save our grocery lists and I mix them in with…
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A Story: One Winter Day in the Life of a Writer
In our house, taking out the trash involves scooping cat litter and adding a week’s worth of poop to our trash. This is usually my husband’s chore. Today, I decide to help my stressed-out husband who is in back-to-back meetings at the office. He says he doesn’t have enough time to take sips of water…
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Gardening in the Rain
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.
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The Power of the Vacuum
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.
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Finding Comfort in a Familiar Family Recipe
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…
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The Art of Grocery Lists
“Why are you using a good Sharpie pen to write a grocery list?” my husband asks. “Because I like how it writes,” I say.
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Lost Socks on Laundry Day
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…
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What I See Outside My Window
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.
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Our Secret Garden
Our garden is growing weeds. We don’t know what to expect in these garden beds because we weren’t the ones who planted them. We inherited them when we bought the house in the dead of winter, bare trees and frosted beds. So I’ve been waiting and watching, checking each morning to see what pops up,…
Ashley Fenker 