Blog : Beautiful-Things
Day One, or Maybe Two
| November 27, 2023 There are people stuck in cars. There’s a driving ban, save essential workers. The essential workers are getting stuck and the rescue teams trying to rescue the essential workers are getting stuck, snowplows are getting stuck trying to rescue the rescue teams, and finally the city gives up.
Playing Hooky
| November 20, 2023 Dad sat at the park picnic table smoking one Marlboro after another, with not a word of protest from my sister or me — poles apart from the week before when we snapped his whole pack in half and flushed it down the toilet.
Homage to the Jewish Morning Prayer Giving Thanks for the Wonders of the Body, Its Vessels and Arteries, Openings and Closings
| November 13, 2023 After getting held up in the Y parking lot all those years ago, after the weirdness of seeing the dark circle within the approaching gun muzzle, after feeling the metal on my cheekbone, the exact spot I’d bumped with the phone receiver earlier that day...
Honey (I Put Down My Ax)
| November 6, 2023 The first one said honey was what Vietnamese hookers called from doorways, so don’t call him that. The next one said honey was a substance to spread on bread, so why did I call him that. Store clerks in the South called all of us honey. Teachers, too, even when paddling our behinds. Oh honey, I hate to have to!
On Massachusetts General Hospital Reaching Out to Schedule Your COVID-19 Vaccine
| October 30, 2023 Even nearly a decade on, they couldn't have known that your cognitive decline and general dislike of communications necessitated all emails come to me.
Jumping in Leaves
| October 23, 2023 Somewhere after the turn of the millennium I slid from leaf jumper to leaf raker, and so on this smoky November afternoon I hold down my job for the boy in front of me during what will be his only non-digital hour of the day.
Ceremony
| October 16, 2023 Spring struggles through enough days to offer tulips. They've popped up in every garden lining the street, and a few reach from the corner where Indie, my twelve-year-old daughter, and I turn toward home.
The Beckoning Rose
| October 9, 2023 Several years ago, my wife and I drove from Charlotte to Pinewood, South Carolina, hopeful we might find the gravesite of my Johnson ancestors. This was the town where my ancestors were slaves on plantations owned by the Richardson and Manning families, who produced five governors of South Carolina.
Skywriting
| October 2, 2023 One evening, when my kids were little and demanding, and my sense of self felt like a slow leak, replaced with the repetition and duty of young motherhood, I took refuge in my backyard. I was alone, feeling a thousand miles away from the desert and mountains of my childhood.
The Cheese Case
| September 25, 2023 On Sunday mornings, I open the shop alone. Pulling myself from the heavy gravity of my beloved, with coffee in hand, I use three keys: lock, gate, door. Apron, lights, sign flipped OPEN—an invitation.
Old Horse
| September 18, 2023 His bones have a hold on the earth, with sinew and muscle built from the hills, corded and bunched over his shoulders and haunches. Along the edges of bramble rose and burdocks, he flushed wild turkeys into flight in front of him, like a ship scattering schools of fish before its bow.
On the 20th Anniversary of 9/11
| September 11, 2023 I think of John Ogonowski, leaving his farm at dawn in his green Chevy pickup . John flew cargo planes in Vietnam, knew the Boeing 767 like creases in his palm. He held the yoke, ran checklists, calmly captained the takeoff of the first plane that would crash into the World Trade Center.
Snapped
| September 4, 2023 I heard the snap before I saw it – my late grandmother’s worn rosary tugged apart by my preschooler’s tight grip. She’d only wanted to look, and I’d let her, and my sudden tears were a surprise.
The Aquarium
| August 28, 2023 Still dark when booms from the living room startle us awake. We stumble toward the sound and find a bird in the atrium. It’s a white-winged dove, like many we see on our daily walks. The glass is splotched from her many attempts to escape, but she is not frantic now.
Hole
| August 21, 2023 A year into the pandemic, as thousands of people were dying each day and March hung its low gray skies over us, my five-year-old son and I went out into the rain and dug a hole. We'd exhausted every game, every book and block.
After a storm, a quiet dinner
| August 14, 2023 We sit across from my grandfather, gone from our lives until this moment, and feed him warm rice from a plastic container balanced on my knee. When he swallows and smiles, I watch a little part of my mother heal, stitched together with each slow blink shared between them.
Depths
| August 7, 2023 From behind the window of an air-conditioned gas station, I see my dad wiping his brow with the flipside of the paper towel he just used to check the oil. He stays outside by the pumps, adjusting the suitcases tied with twine to the top of the station wagon.
Chicken Fingers
| July 31, 2023 The last best friend my Memom had was Marge. Every night at dinner, the two sat together in the nursing home dining hall. With her glaucoma and macular degeneration, Memom could hardly see, so Marge read her the menu.
Mother's Day
| July 24, 2023 My niece knows to reach for my hand when she wants to run through her backyard sprinkler in her Sunday best. I’m the aunt who didn’t move back after college. In my family, women don’t inherit the farm but are expected to stay.
The Bird
| July 17, 2023 “Can you help us?” I don’t know the student leaning into my office with this question. But I’ve just finished active shooter training, a mental health webinar, and several pandemic-response seminars, so I assume the worst. I follow her down the hall as she explains. A bird is swooping around their classroom. It might hurt itself.
Back in the Same Day
| July 10, 2023 “Back in the same day!” my dad proclaims as he eases the car down the narrow driveway of my childhood home. He says this upon returning from the grocery store, or dinner out, or family trips to the movies.
Cool Mom
| July 3, 2023 Nothing about this year has been normal. It’s already the middle of May when the first spring-like weather arrives in Minnesota. The windows are open as I drive my son and his classmate home from middle school. It’s been a year of transitions. It’s been a year of adolescents pushing boundaries. It’s been a year of “No’s.”
Welcome to Iowa
| June 26, 2023 Suffering from jetlag after the 24-hour trip from Singapore, I walked to a convenience store near us and purchased a couple of Red Bulls to keep me awake. The bearded dude at the counter saw the cans and said, “Getting wild tonight, huh?”
Lydia Walked
| June 19, 2023 Lydia walked the day of my miscarriage. At sixteen-and-a-half months old, my daughter was committed to speed crawling across the drought-dirt lawn, to strolling the summer sidewalk while clutching a large, firm hand.
Reckless Memory
| June 12, 2023 That night I drove in the dark with you across the lawn, we were each leaving in our own way and had been drinking for tomorrow...
The Paper
| June 5, 2023 I recently framed the first piece of paper where my anglicized Taiwanese name appears. I paid extra for the solid wood frame and non-reflective glass, so that viewers can see the details clearly, including the black and white passport photo of my six year old self...
Ways of Seeing
| May 29, 2023 At eighty, my mother is a string of adjectives: slight, slow-moving, stooped. “It comes with the territory,” she says and points to her neck. “I just don’t have the strength to hold my head up anymore.”
The Mansion Game
| May 22, 2023 The boundary sign between city and suburb says, “East Grand Rapids: A Better Place to Live,” and maybe it is. As we drive, the houses swell until they are mansions with sweeping green lawns. Of course my four-year-old notices.
Wind
| May 15, 2023 All along the creek trail, the grasses were taller and thicker than we’d ever seen them, the tops brushing our foreheads, even my husband’s, the bottoms obscuring the path, even for the children, their small bodies still so close to the earth...
Trout Lilies
| May 8, 2023 I want to tell Allie that the trout lilies are up. That wood frogs are chuckling where the marsh marigolds shove their leaves through the mud.
