I took my place at the gray table in the gray, poorly-lit room, meeting the gaze of the eyeless skull staked upright before me. A stiff rectangular block of white wax was my only material, and a simple metal implement, sharp like a scalpel on one end and rounded like a spoon on the other, my only tool—other […]
Guest Post
At least once a week, my almost three-year-old and I will wander through the “100 aker wood” with Winnie-the-Pooh and friends in search of heffalumps and woozles. At some point — a voice (mine) — will tell my toddler we’re about to leave the woods. This usually happens a few minutes before I end the viewing […]
Damn you, carefree summer, for being such a fleeting thing! Trading you in for homework and sports practice and band performances…the season of school and tight schedules can be hard on bodies and souls. Parents may suffer the most, according to Niki Wilson in her lovely post from last September–now part of this special summer […]
At three o’clock on Friday morning, August 12, I dragged my husband out of bed to go see shooting stars. I suspected it would be a hard sell. We live too close to the city to view all but the most obvious astronomical events from our backyard; we’d have to drive at least a half […]
The hot, thick summer air in Cambridge, Massachusetts, can make you feel like you’re sitting in a sauna, wrapped in a soaking-wet wool blanket. As a recent, temporary transplant, staying in a house without air conditioning, I needed a place to cool off. I’ve gotten to know all my favorite places by immersing myself in their water—the lakes […]
It is Thing Appreciation Week at LWON, where we bring you the Greatest Hits of our previous posts about inanimate objects. Anne Sasso wrote this post in January of last year celebrating her pocket calculator, which has stood by her for 40 years while planned obsolescence ate all of her other devices — and their replacements. […]
This week at LWON we’re digging into the archives to celebrate the uncelebrated: inanimate objects. Many of them aren’t very impressive inanimate objects. And yet we love them. In December 2014 Nell Greenfieldboyce explained her obsession with paper clips. If you’ve ever worried about the feelings of an inanimate object, or thought about how amazing […]
This is the first post in LWON‘s 4,729th annual Snark Week, a tribute to the Discovery Channel’s Shark Week, filled with what we hope is an equal amount of truthfulness, credibility, and creativity. If you happen to notice we’ve written about sloths before, you may consider the following a timely and urgent update — less […]
