July 17, 2024
Gleanings
- Because parenting when everything is terrible IS THE REASON FOR THE MOTHERFUCKING SEASON. Because breaking the news that life is painful and beautiful and will break your fucking heart so we have to love each other as fiercely as possible while we canis the most important thing a parent can teach, model and personify for their child. I say this because it is perhaps the only thing I know to be true.
- I had heard A Month in the Country referred to so often, with such admiration, that I avoided it, rather cynically, for years, doubting it could live up to the hype. Now I wish I hadn’t.
- All to say, be weird, be exact, make your masterpieces, create good energy, inspire, uplift, conduct your magical weird operations, you know? Because maybe that is doing one other person some good in this world.
- Sometimes you think you’ve lost something and then you realize you still have it in another form. Another shape. A warm grassy slope, trees laden with fruit, wild violets and strawberries scattered in the grass like a medieval embroidery: gone. But what you have now is a close and domestic beauty, smaller, still with its own sweet promise.
- If I’m ever feeling stuck, either in my writing or in life, I just need to go for a walk; to feel the sunshine on my skin, to see the world in the light. I always come back from those walks with an answer.
- Opinions are not bad things to have, they make for interesting conversation, as long as one is open to discussion. But, do we need to have one on every single thing? Is it so out of vogue in today’s world to say: I don’t know enough about that to have a strong opinion on it? To admit that we lack the knowledge and facts to make an intelligent statement or comment?
- By which I mean I would so love for them to sit and watch raindrops.
- By 2019, I felt like a real camper! I, Margaret Lawrence Wizenberg, know how to camp. Every time we load up, I wish we had less gear, and every time we unload at the end of a trip, it was exactly the right amount.
- Our Carolinian Forest is just such a cathedral, only much more hallowed and sacrosanct. After being housebound for a full week, standing in the shelter and comfort of this forest luxuriance, I felt my mind slow and my heart expand, knowing I crave no other architrave.
- It’s reckoning with the possibility that all of our lives, no matter how long or how deep, how wise or purposeful, how clean or messy, big or small, how much we do or get right, say or don’t say, will always be perfectly unfinished, completely incomplete.
- As with any meaningful recovery, it took time for the orange tree to heal from the trauma of being moved outside –– to a weekend of thunderstorms and scorching sun –– with no warning. Acid yellow leaves turned a verdant green, and within six months, half a dozen plump oranges sprang from its robust branches.
- But in 2024, with abortion bans and trad wives and men’s rights activists and the racial disparity in maternal mortality rates and oh, did you hear it’s trendy to be skinny again? it is absolutely jarring to hear Perry telling us that it’s a woman’s world and we’re lucky to be living in it. Is it? And are we?
- When my children were very young, I was prone to joining cults. I use the word “cults” loosely, and what I mean is that I was very vulnerable to answers to the only question I was asking: how is one supposed to live?
- “With a growing family, we need a bigger house.” Can’t tell you how many times I hear this from mid-career professionals, occupying renovated three + bedroom houses in my suburban community of Weston.
- I’m pleased to report it’s raining. It started last night and it’s still going, on and off. The garden is that sort of luminous green you get only when a decent amount of rain falls. It’s very beautiful in the small pockets that I’ve been able to plant out. The existing grass is positively glowing.
- One of the distinct pleasures of interviews after publishing a book is the chance to chat with someone who’s read the book and asks questions about these imaginary friends you’re missing.
- Not all fiction with a romance in it is romance fiction, just as not all fiction that includes a crime is crime fiction: maybe that’s really all that’s at stake here, that Nicholls has written about a romance, he hasn’t written a romance.
