This week I've spent a lot of time thinking about how lost I felt in 1984, the first year I ever planned to be away from home for Thanksgiving (although it didn't actually end up being my first Thanksgiving away from home, as I explain in this essay). It's been decades since I gave any … Continue reading Homesick

With a big deadline bearing down the first week of December, I’ve spent much of this fall sneaking up to Sewanee for long weekends at Rivendell Writers’ Colony, where I hide out from the world and write in a sunny third-floor attic studio that looks out over Lost Cove. There are window seats along two … Continue reading Shadows

Winter is almost here. We haven't had a truly hard freeze yet, and there are still a few flowers blooming in the pollinator garden, but the maples have dropped their leaves, and the oaks won't be far behind now. The Yankee robins have returned from their nesting grounds up north to join the local robins … Continue reading The Thing With Feathers

My husband and I have lived in this house for twenty-two years. Here we raised three children, buried two dogs, raked an uncountable number of falling leaves in this season of constant leaving. All but a handful of our first neighbors are gone now. They have died in their own beds, or gone off to … Continue reading Pickers

Every monarch in the world is hatched on the leaf of a milkweed plant somewhere in the continental United States, and almost all of them spend winters on fir-covered mountains in central Mexico, in clumps so thick that tree branches can crash to the forest floor from their weight. But this March, a storm brought … Continue reading Late Migration

“Nothing is plumb, level, or square,” Alan Dugan writes in “Love Song: I and Thou,” a meditation on the persecutions of marriage. My own marriage feels sturdy and steady, full of joy, but all day long I walk through this drought-plagued landscape thinking that nothing in the world is plumb, level, or square. Inside, wooden … Continue reading Drought

The sun is setting on the lilypond, winking on the water between the floating circles of the lilypads, winking on the brown leaves caught on the green surface of the dense lilies. The wind is stirring the water, rippling the mirrored trees on the bank, and now the deep red leaves of the sumac are … Continue reading Encroachers