More on: marriage

THOUGHTS OF ETERNITY have always terrified me. Sometimes at night I would try to trick myself into imagining it, the experience of never-endingness, and think myself into a cold sweat, starting from the horror to which I had brought my mind. Most often, my late wife Emily was able to sleepily talk me back down, but…

Breaking Glass NOT THINKING, I MENTION the Year of Breaking Glass in front of Ben. His face tightens, but he doesn’t pretend he doesn’t know what I’m talking about, or doesn’t hear the faint yearning in my voice. The year was more like two years, on and off. Glass exploded and covered my couch or kitchen…

The Maytrees by Annie Dillard (HarperCollins, 2007) A NEW BOOK by Annie Dillard comes with extraordinarily high expectations. We expect her observations to make us sit up and notice the natural world—and our part in it—with new eyes. We expect to focus small in order to think large. We expect her lyricism to impress, her language…

ON MONDAY AFTERNOON, Ray Martin ran into a crowd at an early season indoor track meet, hundreds of kids in a dozen colorful uniforms lounging all over, if they weren’t high-stepping in some warm-up ritual dance or actually lining up for a sprint. Everywhere you looked there were perfectly formed bodies, as if there’d been…

Our opened mouths close, but the soft boundary of our bodies remains porous for a while longer. An exchange keeps going on between the darker afternoon light inside and the brighter light outside. The day is loosening its hold. Birds flash across the windows, unidentified. We are still not back from wherever it is we…

Dennis Covington is the author of five books, including the novel Lizard (Laurel Leaf) and the memoir Salvation on Sand Mountain (Perseus), a finalist for the 1995 National Book Award in nonfiction. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times Magazine, Vogue, Esquire, Redbook, Georgia Review, Oxford American, and many other…

THROUGH A WARMING NIGHT the ice dams on the Big Slough thawed, and in the morning the first robins, antic in their hunt for worms, hopped in the south yard. Freddie Cahill’s spirit, dormant through what had seemed the longest winter of the eighty-some she’d spent on earth, stirred once again to meet the season’s…

IN COLD WAR-ERA AMERICA, one of the more remarkable cultural developments was the efflorescence of visual arts programs in colleges and universities. This unprecedented expansion from 1945 to 1990 was launched even as most Americans remained indifferent, skeptical, or hostile to the rise of modern art. The upsurge in academic art programs attracted artistically inclined…

IN THE CAR ON THE WAY to the Grosses’ my wife says, “I’m just hoping we can get to know some of these people. Like really get to know them.” I nod and she goes on, “And I don’t mean like they are projects, like we are just trying to save them.” I agree with her.…