Choose Your Words
One of the most striking tiny details in Madeleine L'Engle's bracing and beautiful memoir, Two-Part Invention: The Story of a Marriage, is L'Engle's habit of swimming for half an hour before breakfast while internally reciting an "alphabet" of verses: The movement of the body through water helps mind and heart to work together . . . It is a good way of timing my swimming and by holding on to the great affirmation...
Where It Will Start Again
Three days after our wedding, my husband Adam and I packed everything we owned into a U-Haul and drove south out of New York State. We had no plan, only a destination: the Gulf coast of Alabama. We left behind everything that was familiar and started a new life together in a new place. We planned to stay for two years. Now, nearly six years later—with no plan, only a destination—we’re moving back. A few even...
The Illegitimate Son of God
Every religion needs its leader, and in Owen Egerton’s The Book of Harold: The Illegitimate Son of God, it takes Harold Peeks, the “Most Improved Sales Analyst” for Promit Computers declaring his Messiah-hood at the company’s annual awards banquet to start Haroldism. But it takes a complete economic collapse and the destruction of the American Dream to seal Haroldism’s place as one of the great world relig...
The Boutique City Conundrum
Everyone in America wants their town to hit the list of the top five places to live in the U.S. - with clean streets, amazing mixed-use housing, and an easy walk to the corner grocery - but what many developers are not asking in the process is, "At what cost?" A few days ago, I watched a special on Portland's city planning process from the past several decades. Portland's government has used something called an ...
On my favorite Kentucky poet
From Smithsonian Magazine: 35 Who Made a Difference: Wendell Berry. As a farmer, he has shunned the use of tractors and plowed his land with a team of horses. As a poet, he has stood apart from the categories and controversies of the literary world, writing in language neither modern nor postmodern, making poems that have the straightforward elegance of the Amish furniture in his farmhouse. And in recent decades, he...
The Simple Complex Life
Photo: Lindsay Crandall I take a lot of walks with my husband and our dog. She's a rat terrier. Think of a Jack Russell with longer legs and smoother hair and you've got it - she's hyper and she's a handful. Because I'm almost nine months pregnant, the purpose of our walks are twofold: I get some exercise (which is supposed to "help things along"), and she gets a lot of energy out. She zigs and zags around, sniffi...
