There are a lot of absolutely bummers about having a February birthday. For one thing, February is solidly in the running for worst month of the year, despite having at least one–Groundhog Day–and occasionally two–Mardi Gras of my favorite holidays. Sometimes my birthday and Mardi Gras end up being the same day. That can be a lot of fun. On the other hand, if Mardi Gras hits before your birthday, that can also come with […]
Back in the old days, twenty (can it be?) twenty years ago, when I inhabited the shabby rental with illogical additions, copious ashtrays, and a rogues gallery of the then-still-stymied and misdirected we affectionately referred to as the Estes Home for Wayward Girls, there was a coffeepot—a cheapo percolater of dime store provenance- on a white painted stool in the kitchen. In that house, the floor was warped, and every time someone moved or jumped […]
Long ago, in a galaxy far away, when I was about three years old, Nana, my favorite grandmother, brought a load of furniture to Asheville in her big red Antique van (a favorite childhood conveyance of mine, what with the back stacked with furniture blankets, the promise of being able to explore a fancy house while the adults haggled, and the general Carter/Reagan era obliviousness for the need for seatbelts allowing me to roll around […]
I am not sleeping well. I don’t mean for this to sound grandiose. While there are plenty of things happening in the world to keep me up at night contemplating, this is not, as my mother would put it, a wrestling with angels scenario. It is merely that I put my head on the pillow, turn out the light and experience what I can only describe as a 5-7 hours of the least restful sleep […]
On Thursday, January 12, 2023, I’m officially going to the hospital, separating from my reproductive system, and making the “Yeah, I don’t think I’m doing the motherhood” subtext text. If you’re the kind of person that measures a woman’s worth by the bun in the oven, or one of those dudes who loves to talk about how it’s evolutionary psychology that makes you like 22 year old girls with long shiny barrel curled hair because […]
Geneva is 12 years old. At 12pm on the 12 day of the 12th month. It is approximately 12 degrees outside, and probably 62 in the house. The thermostat says otherwise, but it is an old house with stingy insulation and a whistling flue in the stone fireplace. She can’t be faulted for lingering between sofa and blanket; it’s warm there. She can’t be faulted for watching hours of a Super 70s Series Holiday Marathon. […]
My paternal grandfather was what people in the South call “a character.” The man himself would have likely agreed with this appraisal, though he would have added “of great moral character, poetic disposition and indisputable noble destiny” to the end of it. He was a legend in his own mind, a bullshit artist par excellence, whose skill at wholesale fabrication suggests that some distant relation may have not only kissed the Blarney Stone but attempted […]
About a million years ago, the soft-spoken brother of one of my best friends in the world was completing his training to be an acupuncturist, and asked if I would be interested in doing an intake session with him. My friend’s brother was a funny, weird, kind guy. I believe it’s important to do things for the funny, weird, kind people in your life, because we are mostly able to survive the world because of […]
Back in the very early 2000s, when I’d first moved to Chapel Hill I went to a show at an adored, now-long- gone venue. I can’t remember what band was playing, but I know that I ran into a guy from my writing workshop Nothing Fancy State University there. This felt remarkable at the time because, save one single, solitary exception, I did not keep in touch with a soul from NFSU, probably because my […]
Some of my favorite songs ever I heard for the first time in my high school music room. This was pretty common at time. This was the early 90s. I lived in a town without a college radio station (even the pop/rock station had gone Full Country at the end of the 80s). Most of what I got, I got from magazines and MTV. Sometimes I’d overhear cool things at the coffee shop or over […]
Tiny Commotions 