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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31 entries tagged #thehartwell.
What the Draft Folder Decided
July fourth. The framing shop printmaking night has been in the draft folder for seven weeks. I want to name that plainly, because the sentence has been patient enough to deserve…
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What the Coat Looked Like When I Actually Looked
February twenty-fourth. The coat was on the hook. It has been on the hook every morning for four months, longer, probably; I stop counting when a thing becomes a given. I was head…
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The Tab That Closed While I Wasn't Looking
February second. The cooking class ran six weeks. I went once. That was October, and I wrote eleven days after the fact about the pasta water, what it actually meant, why it had s…
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The Mug on the Sill
January twenty-second. There is a version of this post I have been writing in my head since October, maybe earlier, since the third walk when I carried the camera and came home wi…
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The Shape It Became
June sixteenth. I published the post on Sunday. It took about twenty minutes to write, which felt right, the draft-folder sentences had been sitting there since March, and by the…
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The Seventh Year
December first. The sentences have been in my draft folder since late October. Three of them, about the light arriving lower than expected, about the cord's shadow going long acro…
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The Counter Versus the Sill
March third. The object has been on the counter for six weeks. I know this because I put it there on a specific January morning and I have looked at it every single day since, whi…
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The Floor After the Call
January seventh. The call was somewhere between an hour and an hour and fifteen, I stopped checking partway through, which is usually how I know it's a good one. When I hung up I…
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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 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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Before You Know That You're Known
October twenty-fourth. There is a particular kind of information that arrives slightly late, not late the way a text sits unread, but late the way a question about you reaches you…
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The First One to Say It
July ninth. For years, the direction of knowing in this friendship has run one way. Simone names the frame, I receive it. She says the thing that's already true before I've found…
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The Thing I'd Been Answering Without Thinking
September fifteenth. The notebook came out because the laptop felt too formal for what I was trying to do. Simone was still here. That part wasn't planned, we'd been at the table…
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The Thing I Didn't Know I'd Claimed
June thirtieth. There are three sentences sitting in a document on my laptop that I wrote eleven days ago and have not sent, posted, or said aloud to anyone. They are not angry se…
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Lemonade, Midnight, No Regrets
February ninth. At some point in the evening, I genuinely cannot tell you what time, Simone and I stopped talking about anything practical and started talking about Beyoncé. I wan…
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First Day of the New Thing, Sort Of
September thirtieth. I want to state clearly that I had printed the schedule. I had printed it, put it on the kitchen table, poured the cold brew, and then, in a sequence of event…
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The Salt Thing
August seventeenth. It started with a recipe. I was looking up something completely reasonable, how long to brine chicken, maybe, or whether I was salting pasta water correctly, a…
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The Part Where I Registered and Then Immediately Panicked About Something Else
September twenty-second. The card details went in at nine-seventeen p.m. on a Tuesday. I know this because my laptop was also open to forty-three pages of notes I was supposed to…
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The Longest Three Weeks of Absolutely Nothing
November eighteenth. I have been telling myself I wasn't thinking about it. This is a thing I am apparently capable of doing for an impressive stretch of time, about three weeks,…
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The Air Changed Overnight
September thirteenth. At some point between Wednesday and Thursday, fall arrived. Not officially, officially it's still ten days away, but the air didn't check the calendar. I wok…
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The Fire Escape Cooperated
July ninth. I had a whole internal debate about the parking meter. I want to be honest about that. We were halfway down the block, Simone had asked if I wanted to walk over to the…
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The Last Thing I Wrote About February
March twenty-first. The workshop ended last week. I keep meaning to write about that, about the actual sessions, the instructor who used the word 'frame' the way other people use…
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What the Comment Said, Specifically
December twenty-fifth. The apartment is very quiet in a way that is distinct from regular quiet. Christmas quiet has a different texture, fewer cars, the radiator doing its interm…
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The Username
November eleventh. There was a comment on an old post. Not the one people occasionally find, not the 'Why Did You Start It' post that Aunt Carol found two years ago, which still f…
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Something Small I Put Out There
I wrote something this week. Not a recipe, not a list, not 'five things I'm loving in March.' Just, something honest. About a class I've been taking. I didn't name the class. I di…
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Two Documents Walk Into a Living Room
Here's something that happened this week that I can't stop thinking about. I came home from creative writing class with a paragraph I'd written during an in-class prompt, 'write w…
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The Post I Didn't Mean to Write
It started because I had nothing to say. I opened a blank draft around ten o'clock, no plan, just that restless feeling you get when you don't want to watch TV but you also don't…
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