Although it’s always difficult to read about a woman repressing a part of herself to hang on to a relationship, I greatly appreciated Moonshine Matthiessen’s essay “Waterfall” in the January 2026 issue. The piece is beautifully written, and Matthiessen is incredibly candid about her experiences. I admire her courage to voice her desires, her shame, and her struggles.
I, too, stayed longer than I should have in a past relationship, and I’ve often wondered about the mechanism of denial. How is it that, so often, we can’t or won’t recognize when remaining in a situation is bad for us?
Perhaps if there were more studies on denial, we would have answers as to why people stay in abusive relationships, how others justify their addictive behaviors, and why so many people in our country remain true to a president who continues to destroy us.
In “Waterfall,” Moonshine Matthiessen powerfully captures a dynamic that I often see as a couples therapist: a controlling and withdrawn man partnered with a codependent woman who is starved for love and connection. Over time, the relationship erodes, which often culminates in divorce.
From the outside it’s easy to urge a woman like Matthiessen to leave, to tell her to stop putting her own needs last. In reality this type of dynamic is often more complex. These patterns rarely originate within the relationship; for example, people-pleasing is often learned early in life for protection or survival. Likewise, her husband’s defensiveness and insistence on being right can be understood as his own protective strategy, an effort to ward off shame or the fear of being fundamentally flawed. Both partners, in different ways, may be trying to protect tender places formed long before they found each other.
Mishele Maron’s essay “Bad Lunch” [January 2026] elicited a rich mix of feelings. The descriptiveness of the writing satisfied me like a good meal. Woven throughout, however, was disgust as Maron described a lifestyle so decadent and clients so self-absorbed and entitled I felt slight nausea and anger. Her piece offers a rare personal insight into this world of privilege and waste.
I felt an immediate sense of connection when I saw the photograph of interviewee William Rees standing against the landscape of British Columbia [“Glass Overfull,” interview by Leath Tonino, December 2025].
My husband and I lived in British Columbia for more than ten years, first in Vancouver and then on one of the Gulf Islands, and our experiences there inspired us to pursue a way of life more rooted in the cycles of the earth. We moved to southern Ohio, where we eventually settled on a hundred-acre farm on the edge of Appalachia.
Life on our homestead has taught us much about both limitations and abundance. We must continually manage scant time and resources to ensure that there will be enough to carry us through a season, a year, and many generations to come—all while balancing the health of our gardens and domestic animals, pastures and hayfields.
As Rees suggests, our efforts to “voluntarily simplify” our lives have certainly involved “huge personal sacrifice.” At the same time, this choice has brought our family more than fourteen years of creativity and freedom, physical health, and the pleasure of being nourished by this particular watershed. Many people—students, families, pilgrims, and neighbors—have gathered around long wooden tables in our barn to feast on the rich and abundant gifts of soil and pasture. I don’t think anyone in our family (including our now-adult sons) would consider the life we have cultivated part of a “public-good free rider problem.” Though challenging, this life has been deeply good. Though sometimes painful and lonely, it has also been profoundly beautiful to share this place with people who are desperate to know “in their bones,” as Rees says, that “we truly are what we eat.”
I agree with Rees’s insistence that, as animals, we must acknowledge our creaturely dependence on the physical world. I felt gutted by his apt description of how technology and artifice have torn us from these “ecological roots.”
At the same time, I want to offer my family’s story as a counterpoint to Rees’s and Tonino’s characterization of the personal costs associated with reducing our ecological footprint. Rees says that individuals and whole countries alike are caught in the “trap” of weighing our ecological choices against the public good. I do not think we need to remain in that trap, believing that our sacrifices mean someone else is getting a “free ride,” nor the trap of thinking it’s not worth it if we, as individuals, choose to “go it alone.”
I was surprised to see that four of the five photos published in the December 2025 Readers Write [“Celebrating”] were all by the same photographer, Kim Weimer. Was that a mistake, or did The Sun intend to give that much printed real estate to one person?
I have nothing against Weimer or her work. I particularly love the shot of two women in swimsuits joyously coming out of the water. But why not offer the gift of publication to more photographers?
I laughed my way through Alice Bradley’s short story “Don’t Be Alarmed” [December 2025]. As I read, I kept thinking, This could be me! It wasn’t the specific events of the story but rather the nuttiness and freedom of being an older woman. Like Beatrice, I say things that shock listeners and astonish even me. And although I don’t have an Esme to listen to me with amusement, I always laugh at myself.
I welcome my rigid hold on things loosening up. At this point in my life I can finally allow myself to walk home on winding streets I have never taken before, using only my intuition as a guide. Or to chat with every three-year-old and their mom as we wait for traffic lights to change. Or to wrap a warm blanket that I seldom use over the shoulders of a homeless man I would have walked past, without really noticing, when I was younger.
There is so much freedom in being a single, older woman. At the end of Bradley’s story, Beatrice thinks to herself that “she was in the exact place she was always meant to be.” I wonder if I am, too.
I delight in receiving and reading The Sun for many reasons, but it wasn’t until yesterday that I realized just how much I look forward to and relish the Contributors page each month. Reading the short bios feels like inviting a whole roomful of informed and thoughtful people into my home for a cozy chat.
All those interesting writers, photographers, poets, essayists, reporters, memoirists . . . It’s been a long time since I’ve felt there were such people out there.
My freethinking older sister gave me a subscription to The Sun over twenty-five years ago. We had just tentatively reconnected after a long period of mutual wariness. Judy was interested in far-out things and striking out on her own again after three failed relationships.
I was suspicious of this new magazine and neglected it for some time, until one day I skimmed through it and was quickly hooked. The Sun helped me rethink how hands-off I had been with my sister and was instrumental in improving our relationship.
Judy died not long after the start of the new year. I remember her and her passion for life whenever I read or share The Sun.
