When I pull into the boat ramp parking lot, it’s just after midnight. It should be deserted. Nobody goes night boating. But my headlights illuminate a red sedan parked hood to the woods. I can’t tell if it’s occupied. The windows are dark. My brain tries to make it make sense. You can’t pull a […]
Cassandra
At first blush, the request from my son’s preschool seemed reasonable. “As spring time approaches we want to encourage families to consider packing ‘waste free’ snacks and lunches, which should help boost your child’s nutritional intake, reduce waste going into landfills, and save money over time.” Sure, we’re drowning in plastic. Let’s produce less waste. It’s […]
I first published this post in April, 2020. Today things are better, but not fixed. We have childcare, but it feels precarious. There are snow days and teacher training days and holidays and sick days. So Many Sick Days. On Mondays, public school ends at 1:45pm. ONE FORTY-FIVE! And there are still too many things […]
Four poems in the style of William Carlos Williams’ “This Is Just To Say” (written to my two-year-old, from whom I am always begging forgiveness for some imagined insult). This is just to say I have thrown the banana you left on the footstool and from which you had only taken one small bite Forgive […]
My first experience with automated transcription happened a decade ago. In 2010 I joined Google Voice and started getting transcripts of my voicemails. The results were, not surprisingly, underwhelming. Back then, most speech recognition software was underwhelming. Here’s my first transcript: Hi Cassandra, this is Anna 10 calling to run. Thank you for the science […]
This post originally ran August 16, 2018. But as COVID19 cases surge, hospitals reach capacity, and the long, dark winter descends, you can bet I’m again feeling the weltschmerz. Two years ago, a poet named Maggie Smith wrote a poem called ‘Good Bones.’ I printed it out, and I find myself reading it over and […]
Confession: I, like so many of my fellow Americans, am not getting enough sleep. Blame the baby. Blame the preschooler. Blame COVID anxiety. Blame my doomscrolling. Blame the dog, who threw up a clump of grass next to the bed at 4am. On a typical night, I sleep between six and seven hours with two […]
Yesterday we turned 10, which is like 120 in blog years. We’re celebrating all week with postcards we wrote to ourselves in May of 2010. Today Ann, Emma, and Cassie report back on the present to their younger selves, or at least offer a warning. Ann Finkbeiner In May, 2010, I was wondering whether the […]
