Faith in Vermont
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Faith Gong: Things we don’t talk about: The Sadness
It feels like various things at various times: a lump in the throat, a bitter feeling on my tongue, tears springing to my eyes, the sense that if…
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Faith Gong: Why you should watch ‘Barbie’
I ended up watching “Barbie” the very next night, with my two youngest daughters. And then, although I rarely see any movie in the theater once, I went…
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Faith Gong: Things we don’t talk about: Parenting teens
I recognized this path: I’d walked it before, and I knew it wound its way in hairpin turns along a steep ridge, so that one misstep could send…
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Faith Gong: My daughter, the lifeguard
My 15-year-old daughter just completed lifeguard training and will soon be looking down upon the splashing masses at our town pool from atop the official lifeguard chair.
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Faith Gong: Things we don’t talk about: Work, family and mortality
I often feel embarrassed about the seeming lack of constancy and direction in my life story. Am I simply lazy? Unmotivated? When I expressed these concerns to a…
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Faith Gong: Things we don’t talk about: Being the anti-hero
I have an uneasy relationship in my head with singer/songwriter/cultural icon Taylor Swift.
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Faith Gong: A Mother’s Day reflection on ‘The Giving Tree’
Herein lies my real beef with The Giving Tree: It’s not just that the tree’s form of giving was bad for the tree, it was also bad for…
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Faith Gong: On dyeing eggs… again
The thing about special holiday traditions is that they are often stressful and messy.
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Faith Gong: The bird that lived
In the middle of a March snowstorm, a lot of people put a lot of effort into saving the life of one mourning dove.
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Faith Gong: The therapeutic benefits of… ironing?
“Vacuuming can be therapeutic,” the middle-aged woman told my 22-year-old self.
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Faith Gong: Letting go of balloons
With five children aged three to fifteen, my parenting radar sometimes get twitchy, oversensitive. My trigger finger gets itchy at every blip that shows up — and believe…
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Faith Gong: A story of marriage in three beds
I wanted to write about love for Valentine’s Day. When I thought about love, I thought about my marriage beds.
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Faith Gong: How to be an undertaker
Our family said goodbye to two remarkable women this past December: My grandmother and my aunt died within two weeks of each other.
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Faith Gong: Life with a saint
Erick’s habits don’t impact me directly, nor has he ever tried to impose them upon me, but it’s almost impossible not to feel lazy and gluttonous next to…
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Faith Gong: Reflections on New Year’s fireworks
The noise — those booms and pops and sizzles — may ward off evil, but it’s also a perfect, primal way to commemorate all the emotions of the…
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Faith Gong: A nearsighted holiday
As I am writing this there are nine days left until Christmas, and we still don’t have a Christmas tree.