LivingSmall

Yesterday I took poor Gimpy Dog over to Billings to the veterinary orthopedist. Even typing that makes me feel slightly ashamed of myself — we live in a nation in which an enormous percentage of our population doesn’t even have human health care, and I’m spending how much money on orthopedic surgery for my dog? […]

A million years ago, when I was still in graduate school and working at the bookstore in Salt Lake City, I picked up Blue Jelly by Debby Bull. I loved this book. I tried my darndest to sell it to people but for some reason, the folks who wanted Bridges of Madison Country didn’t want […]

Monday night I got a phone call from my cousin Jason’s wife. I thought she was calling to thank me for the baby present I’d sent a few days earlier, but it turns out she was calling because my 95 year old grandmother, who lives on our farm with Jason and Jackie and my Aunt […]

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other […]

My dear friends Bill and Maryanne lost their beloved (and enormous) golden retriever Moja this weekend. Moja was a very special dog — one hundred and twenty five pounds of big yellow love — and he died quite suddenly of a twisted gut. It was beyond awful. There were big gulping sobs and tears all […]

It’s an odd week here at LivingSmall — September 11 rolls around once again and I can’t help but remember calling Patrick, who was in the truck on his way to work. He hadn’t wanted to wake me up before he left, just after the first plane hit. We were on the phone together when […]

The garden is finally starting to come in this summer. I’m on vacation for 2 weeks, and I spent a lovely morning the other day puttering in the vegetable garden. I pulled out all the peas, which did really well this year, but which were starting to get woody. The tomatoes are starting to pop […]

I had a long talk on the phone last night with my cousin Jennifer. Jennifer’s four years younger than I am, and her mother was my mother’s older sister. Every time there was a crisis in our childhoods, and there were plenty, we were shipped off to our Aunt Lynn’s house, so in a lot […]

Yesterday was the second anniversary of that sad event Maryanne has named, “Patrick’s Very Bad Day”. Last year I was in Paris for this day, wandering around in a tres melodramatic haze, thinking to myself “Mais, il est mort. Mon frere. Il est mort.” Paris is, in general a good place to go when you […]

This morning my friend Nina called and asked, with that sort of tense tone in her voice, what I was doing. Why? I said. Do you need a rescue? Turns out, she was in the car with the twins, who had a pediatrician’s appointment, and her husband (who is writing for TV trying to support […]