Every year after the clocks fall back, I read Lia Purpura’s essay “Sugar Eggs: A Reverie” from her collection On Looking. In the essay, Purpura is concerned with the space created when one looks into another world: the panorama built inside a sugar egg, a snow globe, a “horse’s scummy water trough,” cells massing to…

November is always an interesting time for a family of vegetarians. While my three children have never lifted turkey to their lips, they’ve come home from school with a multitude of smiling birds cut out in the shapes of their hands, illustrated plates labeled peas, potatoes, and turkey, and all manner of pilgrims and Indians sitting before bulbous,…

The following is a response to Morgan Meis’s letter posted yesterday. Dear Morgan: I’m enjoying this conversation but at times I worry that you’re playing Glaucon to my Socrates. In other words, just egging the “master” on. I want to be sure you’re not just tossing up softballs for me to take a swing at.…

The commandment to love is nailed to my doorpost. Ritualistically written on a little piece of parchment, rolled up, tucked inside a beautifully painted ceramic case, and nailed aslant to the doorpost. I almost never notice it. Not when I’m rushing out of the house in the morning, book bag and gym bag slung over…

Every year, when a specific national obstetrics and gynecology conference (or is it pediatrics?) comes to the Washington Convention Center, the traffic is snarled for blocks along New York Avenue, and the sidewalks thronged thickly with pedestrians. Its scale is such that it seems, in this one local’s perspective, to be outranked by the annual…

American culture, at this late and plural hour, seems to have pretty well normalized the notion of the interfaith family, to the extent that if your environs are urban and/or coastal, and your circles revolve around the ranks of top- and second-tier universities, then the multiple-faith union is almost a given, and certainly not a…

After thirteen years of parenting, my husband and I still know virtually nothing about raising children. But one thing we’ve always agreed on, since even before the first one was conceived, is not including Santa in our Christmas celebrations. Now don’t get me wrong. We’re not one of those families. I don’t homeschool in a…

Summer is here in Australia, a string of perfectly forgettable sunny days lulling us along until the sudden arrival of the holidays. Three years since leaving Canada, my husband, Michael, and I are still bewildered by Christmas tunes wavering mirage-like over the sunbaked pavement at the grocery store. As we drive past the neighbor’s inflatable…

In my last post, “Aftermath,” I described the before-and-after experience of a recent trip to Los Angeles to pitch a drama series for television. Among other instances of what felt like divine timing at the start of the trip despite the dispiriting outcome by the end of it, there was one such instance that could…