Farmhands

Last weekend, I walked the maternal farm. My plan was to get some of its mud in my shoes. As children, we went up to the paternal farm once or twice a year. It wasn’t a working farm then. Our greatest pleasure was to tromp out and get very muddy on our way to The […]

Small Groups

I’ve had to read all this stuff about the Holocaust for some work I’m doing this summer. Spend two hours with the Final Solution, and you better be careful with yourself. To clear my head, I watched an episode of “The Wire,” in which a man was beaten to death. Oops. I had been reading […]

Even Ground

Like most sensitive and interesting people, before I was twenty-two, I had got me to a therapist. I was not getting out of bed, and sticky with unhappiness about the end of my growing-up love affair, and I was ready to have someone talk some sense to me. She said, “If you don’t want to […]

Ravaged

“Katrina” sounds accusatory to me now. It used to be a comforting word. I knew this woman named Katrina enough to ask to share her table at coffee, on one of those outrageous days when people who don’t normally drink coffee are bored or cold or whatever and they invade my coffee sanctuary as stupid […]