What happens between us happens in darkness, vanishes easy and often as each breath. —Sylvia Plath   Blue is the colour that soothes me, the darker the better. Two years ago, I sanded down my wooden table and painted it the darkest blue I could find. I sealed it with coats of polyurethane until …

  On Saturday morning I make breakfast for my toddler, Hazel, set cloth napkins on the table, and put on my noise-canceling headphones. My husband sits next to me and sips his coffee. Hazel plops spoonfuls of oatmeal into her mouth. Río, our 12-year-old Anatolian shepherd, smacks his lips in anticipation of crumbs. Without the …

  Monday, October 16, 1893, is the kind of crisp red and gold New Brunswick morning you’ll sometimes miss by the time you’ve become my white-haired grandfather in California. Today, however, you’re ten years old and your parents are traveling for work, installing turbines at mills, and leaving your brother, Johnson, newly seventeen, in charge …

  Rubber bands. What guides you back to that image, that moment? Is it the rain, this room, the way you wake up slowly to the hum of lawn mowers, or something to do with the season, the smell of lilacs in the air? All of this has happened before. Conversations move like this, too. …

    I don’t know what we’re doing to make our mother walk out. But out she goes, tearing off her apron and slamming the door as she leaves. “I’ve had enough of all of you!” We stare in stunned silence. “Is she coming back?” my little sister ventures. “Of course she is!” My big …

    In the spring of 2021, when New York City was coming back to life after the worst months of the pandemic, I was single and living alone in a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village. Although I had friends in the city, I was spending most of my time by myself. My office was …

    Cobra Lilies From a boardwalk above a bog, I look out to a conclave of cobra lilies. Their bulbous hoods are chartreuse, green globes set on tall stalks. Heads nodding in wisps of wind, these carnivorous plants—Darlingtonia californica—appear to be in conversation. My husband, David, and I have zipped by this spot many …