blogging

Summer: long ago & some writing

One month ago today I picked Grace ad Whit up from sleepaway camp and turned 40.  It feels like that was a hundred years ago!  Today I just want to highlight a few writing- and web-related things that happened over the summer and recently.

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This is Childhood, the book that Brain Child magazine published from our series about the various ages of childhood, is on sale this week for 40% off.  It’s just $6!  What a great birthday or holiday gift … just an idea.  I’m thrilled that my piece, This is Ten, an excerpt from the book (spoiler alert: it’s the end of the book) is on the site today and the link to purchase the book is easily available there.  I hope you will consider it!

 

photoI published Navigating by the Stars on Medium, a site I’ve come to really admire and respect.  For those who think I don’t write about Matt enough, here’s a rare example of a story all him.  It talks about our experience, a few months after we met, climbing Kilimanjaro.  I am proud of this piece and hope you like it.

 

photo(1)I was thrilled when Tabitha of Team Studer profiled me as one of her Moms Next Door.  Her interview, which includes a lot of pictures, is here.

 

 

 

Also: are you on Instagram?  I love it and even when I wasn’t writing here I was sharing photos there.  Please come find me!

Navigating by the Stars

 

Kili

Hi!  Hope everybody is having a marvelous August.  It’s flown by here.  I’m looking forward to being back next week, but am popping on here to let you know I have a piece up on Medium today, Navigating by the Stars.  It’s about the 1998 trip to Kilimanjaro that I took with my then-new-boyfriend Matt, and about the lessons that began to dawn on me as we climbed slowly to the summit.  I’m still learning those lessons.

I hope you’ll click over and read my piece.  I’d love to hear what you think.

Photo of the summit of Kilimanjaro taken from our campsite two nights before, June 1998.

Where I’ll be … August

Brewster flats

Grace, Whit, and my best friend from camp’s daughter, years ago, on the beach where I spent so many summers

It has been a tremendous privilege, not to mention hugely inspiring and educational, to join my friend Aidan in the Here Year.  She announced that she’ll be taking July and August to be here in her life, and in August I plan to join her.  For the last several years I’ve posted pictures in August, and I may still do that from time to time.  I’m not sure.

August is the deep, hot, swampy end of summer, and it’s also when I start feeling keenly the approach of fall.  The year turns towards its next season and as I’ve noted before I think my own sensitivity to endings may come from having been born in this liminal season, when transition hangs on the horizon, coloring everything.

This August Matt and I will have two weeks without the children, who are away at camp (after 1.5 weeks in July).  As I think of my children at the same place where I spent so many summers, I’ll remember yet again how seductive and confusing then and now can be, twining together into a cord of nostalgia and memory and love and loss.  We’ll pick them up on my 40th birthday and then we will have a week of family vacation in Vermont.  We’ll go to the same place for lunch on our way up, and visit the campus where Matt went to college; the drumbeat of tradition will soothe us all, remind us of the rituals that frame so much of our family life.

I intend to be here for all of it.

By the end of the month we’ll have returned to the schedules to which our real lives march.  Soccer practice will have started, we’ll have new sneakers for bigger feet, and I’ll be packing lunches again.

I’ll see you then.

The key is just to start. Whatever it is.

I am so happy to be featured on MorphMom, a site focused on providing inspiration to working mothers of all stripes.  MorphMom, which is run by Kathleen Smith, believes in the value of the myriad identities many mothers carry inside of them.

When you consider the first paragraph on my “about me” page you can tell why I resonate so strongly with the MorphMom philosophy.  I am a woman, daughter, mother, sister, wife, friend, and writer.  I am also a runner, sometime yogi, a disillusioned MBA, a reformed nailbiter, and a proud natural redhead.  I struggle mightily to find a coherent sense of self in all of these splintered identities.

It was an honor to be interviewed by Kathleen and I hope you’ll check out both my video above (the discomfort of watching myself on video notwithstanding!) and the site as a whole.  She asked me about my path to being a writer (a title I still struggle mightily to claim) and about how and when I began blogging.  Towards the end, I conclude that part of the reason I am sad is that I am so happy.  That’s the truth.

Thank you, Kathleen!

I AM A WOMAN, daughter, mother, sister, wife, friend, and writer. I am also a runner, a sometime yogi, a disillusioned MBA, a reformed nailbiter, and a proud natural redhead. I struggle mightily to find a coherent sense of self in all of these splintered identities. – See more at: https://adesignsovast.com/about/#sthash.PuJ1RAGy.dpuf
I AM A WOMAN, daughter, mother, sister, wife, friend, and writer. I am also a runner, a sometime yogi, a disillusioned MBA, a reformed nailbiter, and a proud natural redhead. I struggle mightily to find a coherent sense of self in all of these splintered identities. – See more at: https://adesignsovast.com/about/#sthash.PuJ1RAGy.dpuf
AM A WOMAN, daughter, mother, sister, wife, friend, and writer. I am also a runner, a sometime yogi, a disillusioned MBA, a reformed nailbiter, and a proud natural redhead. I struggle mightily to find a coherent sense of self in all of these splintered identities. – See more at: https://adesignsovast.com/about/#sthash.PuJ1RAGy.dpuf

Ziplining and online highs

This weekend was our annual visit to Conway to celebrate the end of the year.  I’ve got a post in my head that I want to write about the adaptability of traditions and the tension between ritual and new adventures.  So, I will save details for that.  But while I was gone, two great things happened.  Both, enormous thrills.  In fact you could say I can die now.

The first:

Blume

This was in response to a photograph of Grace reading Are You There Me, It’s Me Margaret? that I instagrammed (see below).

The second was when Rebecca Woolf, whose blog Girl’s Gone Child was one of the very first I read and who remains one of my all-time favorite writers here (and anywhere – her book, Rockabye: From Wild to Child, is marvelous) shared a post of mine.  I didn’t know she read my work so it was a huge thrill to realize she was aware of this piece, and her immensely generous words brought tears to my eyes.

The truth is the last few days in my real-life world haven’t been the easiest, so it was a timely, salient reminder this weekend that this online world can bring kindness, light, and connection.  I encourage you to visit and read Girl’s Gone Child if you don’t already.  Rebecca is downright wonderful.

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