I recently traveled to visit a friend and somehow failed to pack enough clothes. Halfway through my trip I found myself in sudden need of a new wardrobe. 20 years ago this would have been a crisis. The stores that carried clothes for fat women could be counted on one hand - half of them an hours drive away and the other…
I clocked a red-tailed hawk today, visually, and I caught its screeches on the Merlin app. Since I started logging birds around The Wallow, I've found red tailed Hawks and red shouldered hawks. What I haven't seen are coopers hawks. I called them coopers for years, but I think I was misidentifying then the whole time. This is a photo (not mine)…
You’ve heard of unschooling, and you are ready to choose it for your family. You might even have started calling yourselves unschoolers already. But there’s this other word tripping you up. Deschooling. Deschooling is the first step to unschooling. Sadly, it’s often overlooked. Without deschooling parents have a much harder time unschooling. They may believe they are unschooling when they are not.…
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego are the central characters of a Christian Bible story. They walk into a fiery furnace and then emerge unharmed. These characters took central stage in a church sermon I heard once about cult-behavior and the three tactics used to turn someone away from god. Change their names. Cut them off from their family. Force them to denounce their…
I’ve never had that many fucks to give. And I’ve also always given way too many fucks. It’s a conundrum. It’s that I’m depressed, I’m anxious, I’m an asshole thing that’s kind of hard to explain unless you, too, are a ball of depression/anxiety/badassery, and then you get it. One way or another, I’m pretty sure I’m giving fewer fucks as I…
This is the story of how the 70s sneaked up on me in a dark alley once. I was born in 1977, but it was well into the 80s before I had a sense of the passage of time and the concept of decades. For me, “the 70s” was always a thing of the past. In fact, I thought of it as…
Originally published: 7/6/2011 On the morning of September 11th, 2001 I was a nanny for an infant I’ll call Chrissy. I was hanging out with Chrissy in the living room of her family’s home, watching a Little House on the Prairie rerun. During a commercial, I walked into the connected kitchen to get something. When I turned the corner back to the…