On the last day of my thirties, I woke early. I got into respectable clothes instead of my horrible gardening gear, and covered my PCOS thinning hair with a hat. I practiced not stimming or talking to myself as I preened and tried to look respectable. Then Jimmy came over in his mechanic’s coveralls, to take Michael and me car shopping. He meant to drive the ill-fated Serendipity around to his place and park her behind the garage until we... Read more
There was a shirt lodged in the chimney. It wasn’t one of our shirts. It was a t-shirt, not Michael’s size, and it had obviously been used as a bird’s nest. We turned on the heat for the first time and found that the furnace kept shutting off for no apparent reason. The landlord called out his trusty handyman, a talkative Appalachian fellow missing a few teeth. He found the shirt, and dug it out, and sat on our... Read more
A reading from the Holy Gospel according to Mark: The Pharisees approached Jesus and asked, “Is it lawful for a husband to divorce his wife?” They were testing him. He said to them in reply, “What did Moses command you?” They replied, “Moses permitted a husband to write a bill of divorce and dismiss her.” But Jesus told them, “Because of the hardness of your hearts he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, God made them... Read more
Autumn has a smell before it has a look. When the trees are still mostly green, dried out around the edges but not in glorious color yet, you can smell the change coming on. It smells like honey when the ground is wet, and brown sugar when it’s dry. It finally rained good and hard last weekend, but now it’s bright again. The nights have been a little chilly, and the days just cool enough to make walking pleasant.... Read more
Donald Trump is completely insane. In case you haven’t guessed, this is my weekly election politics update, which I actually haven’t written in more than a week. I try to write about the pro-life movement and Ohio politics separately, and just have one snarky post about the week’s political news, but I’ve been putting this one off because I wanted to wait until after the vice presidential debate this evening, in case anything interesting happened there (it did not). Please... Read more
How do you get rid of Serendipity? I’m not asking some kind of philosophical question; I’m talking about my car. I was hoping to sell what’s left of that thirteen-year-old Nissan I so comically named Serendipity: a car with good brakes, great tires and and a shiny frame, which sometimes jerked when I hit the gas and smelled suspiciously of mildew, with a dry rotted wiring harness hidden under the heat shield and a host of junkyard parts I... Read more
Thank you to the readers who asked if we were okay in the rainfall after Hurricane Helene: we’re fine; it didn’t hit my part of Appalachia at all. All we got was some much needed rain, and I felt guilty. Appalachia has different regions just like every other part of the world; I live in the very top of Northern Appalachia, across the river from the chimney of West Virginia. That part wasn’t hit at all, though there are a... Read more
September wasn’t an easy month, but we ate well. We almost didn’t because things have been so difficult. At the beginning of the month we were still behind on rent and in serious trouble, but thanks to a series of lucky breaks, we broke even at zero about halfway through, and then we had to put every penny towards trying to replace my catastrophe of a ten-year-old Nissan– and we’re still not quite there yet. I wondered how we were... Read more
The first gasp of Autumn is not color, but drying up. September is the drying up time of year. It’s not colorful and beautiful Autumn yet. It’s the part of Autumn where the trees start to look exhausted and dusty. I desperately want to go for a hike out in the woods, to see the dusty trees before they change color. Hiking is how I breathe. It’s absolutely vital, and I’ve been without it for three months. At this... Read more
I want to talk about a couple of important articles I read recently, and the backlash they got, and what it has to do with pregnancy and defending life. My friend Rebecca Bratten Weiss recently wrote a really good article for U. S. Catholic, where she laid out the case that Kamala Harris, while certainly not pro-life, has a policy approach that is in better alignment with a consistent life ethic than the Republican platform. And remember, I insist that... Read more
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