Since y’all seemed to like the talked-through bacon and brussels sprouts recipe, here’s one more: creamed pearl onions, a Thanksgiving and Christmas classic from holidays at home that has won new converts up here, where it’s going to a friend’s house this afternoon. (Sorghum sweet potatoes and a hummingbird cake, the Southern- and fruit-infused cousin […]
Read moreNext time you want a quick, warm, good winter supper — or a dish for Thanksgiving — especially if you are a Southerner in the Upper Midwest, here’s what you do: Go out in your garden and break off some Brussels sprouts. Brush off snow as necessary. Bring the individual sprouts cupped in your shirt […]
Read moreI took my late grandmother’s nativity scene out early today. It’s white ceramic that looks like china: three kings, a shepherd, Holy Family, and two sheep. This could have been a graceful afternoon project I imagine my grandmother doing with her medical auxiliary or book club lady friends, her elegant fingers smoothing the glaze, placing […]
Read moreThe Internet’s aflame with outrage over the killing of a male lion in Zimbabwe – a park favorite named “Cecil” – by a dentist from Minnesota. The lion was baited outside of park boundaries by the hunter’s guides so he could be shot, which is not only immoral but illegal. I mourn the death of […]
Read moreReading Craig Lambert’s new book Shadow Work for research on my own manuscript, my thoughts went immediately to faculty, at my college and elsewhere. “We are living in the most prosperous era in human history,” Lambert writes, “and prosperity supposedly brings leisure. Yet, quietly, subtly, even furtively, new tasks have infiltrated our days, nibbling off […]
Read moreAll around me in the half-light of thirty thousand feet, people abandon themselves to sleep: mouths slack as babies’, heads lolled back. A brown-skinned woman in a pale turban dozes under an airline blanket that in this light is startling persimmon-gold. A child curls across two seats, pink headphones clamped against her silky hair. My […]
Read moreThe recent controversies about “free-range parenting” have me thinking about something every college professor deals with: the relationship between parents and their college-age children, which is often very different from what we experienced with our own parents when we left home. Recently a prospective student’s parents asked me, “So, everything you are saying about self-motivation […]
Read more“My mother had a collection of old lace, which was famous among her friends, and a few fragments of it still remain to me, piously pinned up in the indigo-blue paper supposed (I have never known why) to be necessary to the preservation of fine lace. But the yards are few, alas; for true to […]
Read more“…at the same time I felt so strongly the pull of another thing, a thing having to do with music, freedom, the future, individuality. This is an important reason why I became a writer, I think, for in everything I write, I am seeking freedom, which to me is a state that is inaccessible to […]
Read moreStruggling to absorb the wondrousness of Philae, the observatory device shot into space this week to stick to and photograph a comet, I can only fasten on the verb: harpooning. It’s a suitable invocation of an attempt to fasten ourselves to mystery, to the curved back of the large beast hurtling past our limited world […]
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