As soon as the sun’s up, I throw on my jacket and head outside. I’ve been doing this everyday lately. There are developments. I’m anxious to learn the latest.

Most recently: crocosmia. Their slender shoots have just poked through the ground. Already up: the weirdly shriveled starts of peonies, red in their infancy, and tulip leaves, sinuous like unspooled ribbon. Also making an appearance: iris spears, poppy mounds, clumps of bleeding hearts, and the ruffled foliage of columbine. [Read more…] about All of a Sudden

A few weeks ago, I met friends for dinner at the Custom House, a restaurant located in a historic building by the Erie Canal. Anna and Adrienne are interesting, smart women, and I’d happily hang out with them anywhere, but on this particular wintry night, I was glad we’d picked this spot. The Custom House, with its wooden floors, brick walls, musty air, and long windows overlooking the canal’s milky gleam of ice, seemed right for our discussion.

We’d gotten on the strange subject of ghost stories.
[Read more…] about Haunted

The 1987 romantic comedy Moonstruck, about a thirty-seven-year-old Italian-American widow (Loretta Castorini) who falls in love with her fiancé’s estranged brother, is a cinematic gem, how it presents family life in all of its marvelous messiness and unwraps love’s loony sweetness. It’s one of my favorite films.
Loretta’s mother is Rose, played by Olympia Dukakis, and this woman has some of the best lines. She tells her husband who’s having an affair, “I just want you to know no matter what you do, you’re gonna die, just like everybody else.” And when Loretta admits she doesn’t love her fiancé, Rose doesn’t even blink, just says flat-out, “Good. When you love them they drive you crazy because they know they can. [Read more…] about On the Eve of Unleaving

Not too long ago, my eight-year-old son paused in the living room to watch me vacuum a crumb-strewn rug, a mess of my own making. I’d accidentally bumped a bowl of Flavor Blaster Goldfish off the coffee table. When I finished cleaning up the snack, Quinn (visibly perturbed) demanded, “What are you doing with Daddy’s vacuum?”
That question says a lot about life under my roof.
The vacuum belongs to my husband. The kids would also consider the kitchen sink, washing machine, and dryer more their dad’s than mine, since Michael handles the laundry and dirty dishes. (I’m not a total slug. The oven and refrigerator mostly belong to me, and fixing meals is a lot of work, you know. Sheesh.) [Read more…] about Leisureland, Derailed

Blanchard and Beverly

When I was a kid, my family moved a lot. We went from a trailer to a house in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, then onto Jamestown, New York, where we made stops at an apartment, a small house, then a medium house, then a spacious, if ramshackle, house, all in different neighborhoods, the blocks of the city like squares on a checkerboard, leaped without consideration of likely outcomes, our game of pausing, starting over, landing, and picking up haphazardly played. If the game involved strategy, it came down to one principle: bigger was better, even if the bigger house came with a rougher neighborhood. I suppose we got something out of these moves, but I’m not sure what. Pieces—toys, a favorite lilac bush, friends, a stamp collection, schools, a cat’s pawprints memorialized in the concrete of a sidewalk—were lost along the way. [Read more…] about People Are Dying. Babies Are Crying.

Ask me again what I offered as a sacrifice to the rooster crowing his betrayal of morning. Forgiveness, what a sharp blade I press my body hard against.”
—Marci Callabretta Cancio-Bello’s “In the Animal Garden of My Body” from the Poem-a-Day series, Academy of American Poets

I’ve been thinking about these last two lines of Cancio-Bello’s poem, mulling forgiveness and the sacrifice it entails—the relinquishment of pride, anger, righteous suffering—and reflecting on forgiveness and pain, that “sharp blade” that so often is a twofold ache, a recollection of the initial external hurt (whatever action entailed forgiveness in the first place) combined with the agony wrought by bringing oneself to forgive.

Forgiveness is hard. About her own poem, Cancio-Bello said, “I have spent a lifetime studying forgiveness and am constantly humbled by how complicated, impossible, and necessary it is to every memory.” [Read more…] about For Shame

Author Melissa Ostrom doing her homework.

I taught eleventh and twelfth grade English for eleven years. People would often say to me, “Wow, you must really like kids.”

Well, I do like kids. In fact, I have two of my own!

But I didn’t go into teaching because I adored teenagers and wanted to spend hours and hours (AND HOURS) in their company. I did it because, as a student, I loved the classroom, especially the language arts classroom, a world alive with stories and emotions, discussions and investigations. It seemed as close to a utopia as I was likely to get. In that environment, I could exercise my passion for reading and writing, think hard about difficult subjects, dwell on the human condition, and wade into the subtleties of literature. Heaven! [Read more…] about Get Yourself Good and Stressed

Light splashed this morning
on the shell-pink anemones
swaying on their tall stems;
down blue-spiked veronica
light flowed in rivulets
over the humps of the honeybees;
this morning I saw light kiss
the silk of the roses
in their second flowering,
my late bloomers
flushed with their brandy.
A curious gladness shook me. [Read more…] about The Transfigurations Out Back