Essay & Memoir

You were embryo #10. You brewed in your petri dish, doubling every day in the low-humming laboratory. I imagined you, exposed under the microscope,...

Holobiont. Agustín Fuentes gave me this new word at the beginning of the New Year, during the On Being podcast with Krista Tippet titled...

I’m not grateful. This worries me. Isn’t it somehow wrong that I stumble on what should be an easy path to virtue and happiness?...

Lying next to me in the grass, Finn tilts his twitching nose upward, registering every smell — moles, I presume, and grackles and chipmunk...

"... you have to surrender to the essential wildness of the work.” - Julia Phillips When I surrender to the essential wildness of my yard, it’s...

“We’ll call her Marie Maroo if she’s a girl,” my father teased. “If it’s good enough for a boat, it’s good enough for our...

Her skin was always so soft. Everyone noticed. It didn’t look like 95-year-old skin. We attributed this wonder to decades of Nivea cream application...

My husband’s aunt died of COVID-19 last week. She stopped breathing as her son and husband were driving her to the hospital. By the...

Diphenhydramine, Spironolactone. Celebrex, Xtandi, Robaxin. I would sort my father's pills by linguistic patterns: syllable count, consonance, alliteration. I liked Omeprazole because it sounded...

I sanitized, gowned, tied the billowing fabric around my waist and neck. Then: blue gloves over cuffs, face shield over N95, breath cocooned in...

I don't like to plan, but I want to have a plan. I want that feeling of security before heading into a situation, a...

Reflections on Ambivalence and Identity Sometime in early February of 2020, during the hazy weeks leading up to sheltering from home, I walked to the...