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Marriage
Let Nothing You Dismay
How can you help remembering it, all of it, when Christmas comes? Christmas is like drowning and seeing your life before your eyes. Every year — and it’s the darkest week of the year — someone strings lights on a tree, and you stand in front of it with whoever or whatever is supposed to make you happy. And you smile, maybe in honest, naked joy, or maybe you fake it because you got an umbrella.
November 2013
Kitchen Ghost
My husband killed himself in our kitchen, / a wide-open room with a forty-gallon barrel / of water standing close to the old woodstove.
October 2013Already Falling
You think you can feel the peace in this room. A line from Matthew comes to you: “Forgive us as we forgive . . .” Something is happening here with the light and the birds and the wind outdoors: a transformation from despair to readiness. You call for your mother.
October 2013
Mercy
Jimmy nods toward his tow truck, and Davis gets in the passenger seat. Sliding in beside him a minute later, Jimmy offers coffee and some kind of airy sweet, the exact right thing. This is how a moth must feel when it finally gets to the light: warm inside and out.
September 2013
The Whole House
“I don’t know what we’ll do if they don’t hit water,” I told him, scrolling through a table of well-restoration data I’d found online. This was my real fear, both for the well and for IVF — that our efforts would not work, and, financial resources depleted, we would have to figure out a plan B.
September 2013
The Battle We Didn’t Choose
“When people see these photographs, I hope they see life before death,” Angelo says. “I hope they see love before loss.”
July 2013
Blueberries
Basia watches her granddaughter, Lalka. No matter what else she does — digs in the garden, pulls weeds in the greenhouse, peels the potatoes — always she watches her granddaughter, who has a reddish-purple birthmark over her neck and jaw and part of her cheek. Her husband, Zbigniew, watches Lalka too.
April 2013
In The Hills
For all you women out there, as the song goes (there must be a song that goes like that), this is how it is when you leave us: We wake up at midnight in our mother’s house, in our childhood room, in our childhood bed, and we think to ourselves, What am I doing lying here while, in New York, in my apartment, in my real room, in my adult bed, my wife is leaving me? Then we think that she is probably not alone in that bed. Then we get up.
April 2013
March 2013
Let me start with gratitude: The world is broken in ten thousand places. Can I be thankful for the brokenness? How else can I learn to love the broken world?
March 2013
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