I was at work on the morning of September 11, 2001, when American Airlines Flight 11 hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I was sitting in my office in Kingston, New York, a town located about 90 miles north of Manhattan, when a colleague told me about it. I’d initially assumed it was a small plane that had flown into the building by mistake.

Eighteen minutes later a second plane, United Airlines Flight 175, crashed into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. …

It took me 19 years to love my house and now I may lose it.

I don’t know when the ash trees died. By my estimate, it was at least eight years ago, maybe longer. That means we let them stand, dead, for nearly a decade because we could not afford to remove them.

This past spring, I finally called the town to see if there was anything they could do. Two of the trees were precariously balanced near the road. I could scarcely afford to have them both removed, but luckily I didn’t have to come up with the…

An email from my daughter’s school arrived in my inbox at 1:19 pm on October 1st that took my breath away. It was an unsigned announcement notifying parents that, due to severe budget cuts, all students in the district must resume in-person classes on November 9th.

This contradicted what we’d been told (repeatedly) since September. Namely, that her high school would remain completely virtual for the entirety of the 2020–2021 school year.

I’d tried to process the information without panicking and, after reading the email several times, found a link at the very bottom that read, simply, “Remote Instruction Continuation.”…

My daughter’s psychiatrist starts every session with the same question.

“How are you feeling?”

She directs the question to my daughter, but invariably glances at me.

I’m not sure why I’m required to be present at these appointments. I assume it’s so I can weigh in on my daughter’s mental health. Most of the time I am completely silent. I sit helplessly beside my struggling teenager while she explains that getting out of bed isn’t as excruciatingly difficult as it was a month ago.

“I don’t think about dying anymore,” my daughter replies. Her smooth brow furrows. …

I noticed the first Cardinal a few months after my daughter died. It was a male, shockingly red. It landed in one of our dead ash trees (the tree that fell, with an explosive crash, this past September).

When I saw the bird, I thought, “She’s sending me a sign.”

Death came with me everywhere that year. It lingered at the threshold of the doorways she used to walk through in this house where she grew up.

I lingered too, wandering through the house, feeling barely alive, looking for signs — feathers, coins, heart-shaped stones.

I made my husband drive…

“ No, no, there is no going back.
Less and less you are
that possibility you were.”

— Wendell Berry
​

A long time ago, I didn’t have the patience to sit and watch birds.

I was the busy, self-employed mother of two little girls. I had painfully specific goals and stressfully explicit expectations. I wanted to achieve.

I recall (hazily and from a distance) the constant sense of urgency and frustration, the touch of desperation, the need for respite, and the willingness to give every ounce of free time to that former version of myself.

Maybe I was trying…

This Is Us

My daughter Ana was tiny, partly because of genetics and partly because she got sick right before she hit puberty. She stood just over five feet tall and weighed between 105 and 110 pounds. Her bones were small and birdlike, her features delicate. She reminded me of a porcelain doll.

Little girls, especially shy ones, can sometimes disappear in a world filled with bigger, louder people.

But Ana was determined to be seen and heard. …

At the height of her popularity, Erma Bombeck’s column, At Wit’s End appeared in more than 900 newspapers and was read by an audience of 30 million people. Her pieces were funny and poignant. They shed light on the day-to-day drudgery of being a housewife at a time when the national conversation about gender roles was shifting.

She started writing her column in the late sixties and she quickly became a household name, achieving tremendous success throughout the seventies and eighties.

She would go on to write fifteen books, some of which were collections of her many essays. I read…