Faith Gong: Story of my life

Perhaps because I’m a writer and a lover of literature, it’s been helpful for me to view life in terms of story.

“Mommy, what do two lines mean?” my nine-year-old daughter called across the kitchen. And just like that, the Bad Thing entered our house

It’s an obvious metaphor, but it’s true: Where you look is where you’ll go.

I need to come clean: Although I’ve written on this topic in a variety of ways before, I’ve always beat around the bush, obscured my true feelings, tried to be polite. But I think it’s time to be honest, to come right out and say it: I don’t like summer.

I am typing this from a desk in our Airbnb rental house in Huntington Beach, California: a beige stucco bungalow in a residential neighborhood of tightly packed stucco bungalows surrounded by high walls. There are three palm trees in the front yard. The b … (read more)

At the end of July, I attended a friend’s wedding in Indianapolis. Sounds simple, right? Friends, if anything was ever simple, these days nothing is simple.

We may not be able to stop the end of the world, but I don’t believe for a minute that we can’t make the world a better place in the meantime.

Just like that, time moves on. The leaves cover up the evidence of a pandemic that shook our world for over two years; a dump truck carries away the last remnants of the tornado that rocked our neighborhood.

It wasn’t the first time a bird had become stuck in our woodstove; this had happened twice before.

On two hot days Faith and family loaded up two vehicles with assorted children, grandparents, a deflated kayak and paddleboard, and a portable pump, and headed out to Branbury Beach State Park on Lake Dunmore.

Our family’s pandemic coping strategies have failed to follow national – or even logical – trends. We were already living in Vermont, homeschooling, gardening, and keeping chickens when COVID-19 hit, so we had many of the boxes checked already.

Our columnist spent the majority of her 20s in Manhattan. Years after leaving she returned recently with a 14-year-old daughter to revisit old stomping grounds.

In the week leading up to the play — a grueling week in which regular classes were largely suspended in favor of rehearsals — students started dropping like flies.

As a young mother who often felt in over my head and struggled with whether my small daily efforts mattered, Beth gave me the invaluable gift of letting me see how her life — a life made up of small daily efforts — mattered enormously: She held the world … (read more)

It will probably not surprise you to learn that 2012-2013 – the year the music died — was the year our family got a puppy and the year I gave birth to our fourth child.