Category: Essays

After my father had been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer but before he was actually dying, a plant he’d never seen before appeared in the clearing in his ...

1. I have no scrapbooks, no shoe boxes crammed with keepsakes. No stash of yearbooks, diplomas, theater programs or halves of torn concert tickets, the first do...

We wanted to escape the family misery, and we were going to do it by moving out and getting our own place to live. That’s how we’d ended up here, walking from r...

I can hear Rips pounding on the living room window. “This will be the last time you lock me out of your house!” “If you break that window, I’ll call the police!...

When I walked in the door of their apartment at Villa Ventura, my father was sitting in his chair by the sliding door that gives him a view of the woods to the ...

In the quiet of a summer night, crickets chirping and sun setting, sipping a glass of American Honey on the back patio with my husband, I text my colleague to s...

  My father isn’t dead. But the man who I knew as my father is no longer with us. His thin frame slumps in a wheelchair in a family-style residence for Alz...

  A friend asked me to tell him a childhood story of wind and I told him of standing on the red cinderblock retaining wall next to the garage when I was ei...

  Today I bought a buttery bouclé sweater in a town I’ve no connection to at all. I was home visiting my sister, Amy, in Minnesota.  I live in New Yo...

The first surviving photograph, View from the Window at Le Gras, was taken in 1826 (or maybe 1827—it’s not entirely clear) by Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. He was 61...