Where the Prints Live for Now
Three weeks ago I brought two prints home from the framing shop and propped them against the kitchen wall. Not on the windowsill, there is no room there, and they are too large fo…
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48 entries tagged #slowliving.
Against the Wall, Still
September ninth. The prints have been leaning against the kitchen wall for three weeks. Not hung. Not placed. Not on the windowsill, not on the shelf above the stove, not anywhere…
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What the Leaning Means
September eighth. The prints have been against the kitchen wall for three weeks. Not propped with any intention, just leaning, the way something leans when you set it down to thin…
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Still Against the Wall
September fifth. The prints have been leaning against the kitchen wall for three weeks. Not on the wall, against it. There is a difference, though I have been slow to name it. I m…
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The Party That Earned Its Own Paragraph
January twentieth. There are evenings that do not need a record and evenings that insist on one. This was the second kind. Somebody's birthday, the kind of milestone that felt gen…
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The Distance That Finished Itself
October thirteenth. The route is four-point-something miles. I stopped measuring it precisely sometime in 2009 because the precision was getting in the way of the point, and I nev…
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The Walk Home Was the Interesting Part
June twenty-fifth. There was a date. I went on it. It was, by any reasonable measure, a perfectly fine evening, good restaurant, easy conversation, no uncomfortable silences or mo…
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The Measuring Standard I Didn't Know I Had
May twenty-third. There was a date. I am going to name that plainly because I spent the first two drafts of this tiptoeing around it, which is its own kind of information. A datin…
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Three Hooks, One Coat, One Question
March seventh. The camera has been in the bag for four months, carried on walks, to the maker's market, through the whole back half of last year, and I have not used it once. Not…
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The Mug Got Its Picture Taken
February thirteenth. There is a version of this I did not write, the one where I explain, carefully, all the reasons the camera stayed in the bag. I have been drafting it since Oc…
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The Call Ran Long
December ninth. The apartment goes quiet in a specific way this month. Not the usual quiet, the building settles, Gerald does nothing, the windowsill holds its arrangement the sam…
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What the Box Became
August twenty-first. I published the post this morning before the coffee was gone, which is probably the right order of operations for something that short. It was maybe four para…
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The Tab Closed Itself
May twenty-fifth. I have read the class description four times now. I know this because I counted the browser tabs. It was never more than two open at once, I would close it, come…
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Soup on the Floor, Usher on the Screen
February sixteenth. The soup was already open, already warming, and I had fully intended to eat it at the table like a person. Then the halftime show started and I sat down on the…
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The Noun Was Linen
September fourth. Three weeks ago she stopped the sentence before the noun and I have been sitting with the shape of that gap ever since, the material unnamed, the thing itself un…
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The Empty Box, Eventually
May seventeenth. The box has been on the kitchen shelf since December 2021, which means it has been there for a year and a half, which means I have walked past it approximately fi…
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The Third Time You Look
April fourteenth. Easter weekend. The box has been on the kitchen shelf since December, and I have opened it twice, once in January, once in early March, and both times I named on…
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What Remains
April third. I didn't plan to open the box today. It's Easter weekend, the kind of slow Sunday that arrives with a quality of permission, nothing is expected, the light comes in a…
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The Afternoon That Was Already There
November eleventh. Eleven days since Halloween and I am still thinking about the light on that block, the way it arrived without being arranged for. The thing about the day-trip s…
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What the Windowsill Already Knew
September twenty-eighth. I put the cord on the windowsill because I didn't know where else to put it. That was the whole reason. I'd tied it off, held it for a minute, and then se…
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Slightly Apart
September seventeenth. I didn't put it there on purpose. That's the thing I keep coming back to. The cord was finished, I had tied it off, and I needed to set it down, and I put i…
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The Date Passed
September sixth. The print sale at the framing shop was last weekend. I know this because Simone told me about it in August, and I put it in my calendar with the particular optimi…
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Just a Thursday, Actually
May nineteenth. The grade came back on a Thursday afternoon, which is not how I had written it in my head. I had, apparently, imagined something more cinematic. A moment of arrivi…
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Back at the Door
May eighth. Someone said something to me a few months ago, I wasn't going to write about it, and then I kept almost writing about it, and here we are. They said they went back to…
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The Stranger Who Came Back
April twenty-seventh. Someone I know said something a few months ago about coming back to a thing after a break and feeling like a stranger in it, like the room had rearranged its…
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The Stranger's Hands
January twenty-ninth. Someone said something at the end of a session last Tuesday that I keep turning over. She said she'd taken a break over the holidays, not a planned break, ju…
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What It Weighs
January eighteenth. I didn't plan to open the box this morning. I'd been walking past it since December, on the counter, then on the chair by the door, then on the kitchen table,…
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Before the Letter
November twenty-fourth. The box came on Tuesday. I had mailed the reply to Carol's letter eleven days ago, short, honest, the one I'd written three times in my head before I final…
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What Was Still in There
June twenty-third. I needed a measurement. That is the whole reason I opened the sketchbook, I thought I'd written something down, a width or a count, some domestic note I'd filed…
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Three Reads
May tenth. The letter came in a stack of nothing, a utility notice, a circular I didn't ask for, and then this. I almost put it on the counter to deal with later the way I do with…
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The Morning After the Draft
April eighteenth. Easter Sunday. I pressed publish at seven forty-three this morning, before the coffee had finished, before I'd done anything else. That felt intentional even tho…
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What the Draft Finally Said
March twenty-seventh. I published it this morning. Not the version I'd been circling for weeks, returning to twice a day without opening, but the one that finally had the right se…
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What Beginning Looks Like When It's Passed Down
February eleventh. I published it this morning. The draft that started as a letter to Carol's letter and turned into something I hadn't planned to write about at all. I've been ci…
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What She Passed Down Without Knowing
January thirty-first. I published it this morning. The draft that had been sitting in a folder since early January, the one I kept opening, reading two sentences of, and then clos…
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The Part You Don't Plan For
December eighteenth. The paper hats were Simone's idea. She found them at the bottom of a kitchen drawer, the kind of find that shouldn't be surprising and somehow always is, and…
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The First Morning of the Year
January first. The apartment is very quiet in a way it only is when the rest of the city is either asleep or nursing something. I made coffee before I was fully awake, and then I…
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What She Chose
November seventh. Carol's letter came on a Thursday and I read it standing in my coat, keys still in my hand. I don't know why I didn't sit down first. Some letters you just read…
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What Carol Chose
October sixteenth. The letter came on a Wednesday. Not a card this time, two full pages, Carol's handwriting going all the way to the margin on both. I stood at the kitchen counte…
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Four Pages, Seven Years
February eighteenth. The sketchbook has four drawings in it now. That sentence still catches me a little when I read it back. I photographed it Tuesday evening right after I finis…
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The Fourth Drawing Is the Whole Thing
January twenty-seventh. I finished it Tuesday evening and then I just sat there. The sketchbook open on the table, the drawing done, and nothing particular to do next. I wasn't re…
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The Thing the Room Is Waiting For
August twenty-sixth. I've been standing in my apartment at odd moments, between coming home and putting my bag down, between boiling water and the kettle going off, and noticing t…
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What the Paper Knows
April twenty-seventh. The workshop costs what it costs. I have known the number for three weeks, it was on the flyer at the gear shop, printed in small type at the bottom right co…
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Smaller Than I Thought
March fourteenth. I wrote the new number down last night. Not in a spreadsheet, not on my phone, on the same kind of paper I've been using since 2011, the scratch-pad kind, the ki…
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Smaller Than Expected
August twenty-eighth. I showed her on Thursday. Not the published version, the working draft, the one that still had a crossed-out paragraph in the middle and a note to myself in…
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One Question
August sixth. I showed Simone what I wrote. Not the post as published, the draft. The messy one, the one I wrote two Saturdays ago with my coffee getting cold and the apartment to…
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The Image Did Most of the Work
February fourteenth. There is a photograph on the windowsill, between the collapsed bowl and the letterpress card, that has been there since May. I placed it without ceremony and…
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The Tuesday That Filled Itself
It was a Tuesday. I know it was a Tuesday because I checked, after the fact, which tells you something about how the morning actually went, not like a milestone, not like a thing…
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The Brochure I Picked Up Just to Look At
November already. I don't know when that happened. The community center brochure has been sitting on my kitchen counter since sometime last week, I grabbed it when I was in there…
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