In the run-up to Mothers’ Day, we at LWON honored motherhood and, in some cases, the amazing women who gave us the gift of life. (Some of us might have preferred a new bike, but we got what we got.) It all started with Michelle getting to know the Perfectionist (purposeful capital P) in her daughter, a character […]
Miscellaneous
I wasn’t sure I would become a mother. I struggled with the question for years. I fretted about the loss of freedom. I worried I would become someone I didn’t recognize. And then, I found myself pregnant. Nine months later I had a daughter. The early months were harder than I ever could have imagined. There […]
“There is something to be said for being with your teenage daughter and not showering for six days,” a mother told me recently. Daiva had just gotten back from a trip to Death Valley with her 16-year-old daughter where they cooked on a backpack stove and climbed over dunes. They drove to the farthest ends of […]
The night before I wrote this, I couldn’t sleep. There was a halfmoon beaming into my face through the windows, thrown open to diffuse the 90-degree heat that had collected like smoke in the eaves of my bedroom. There was my restlessness from poring through notes for a feature that I was trying and failing […]
My mother was dying. It was time to get ready. First came the visit to a funeral home where we walked among the coffins as if shopping for a new couch. Deep woods polished shiny; insides pillowed, all velvets and ruffles; pallbearer handlebars in brass or chrome. But no, too fancy, and she’d be cremated anyway, […]
Here at LWON this first week of May, we wrote about stuff. Two guests helped fill our pages. Emma Marris pondered the constraints of urban parks and their tendency to tidy nature’s wildness away. And Ramin Skibba (who wins for having the coolest name) opined about the unprecedented March for Science, wondering if it could […]
In October of 2013, I toured three miles of disused railroad line in Philadelphia. Some of it was underground, some on ground level, and some elevated. All of it was covered in spontaneous vegetation—garden plants, common weeds, and native species, a wild, diverse hodgepodge of over 50 species alive with fungi and butterflies and ladybugs. […]
April 24-28, 2017 This week at the Last Word on Nothing: There is magic in the ambiguity of a number given in place of your identity, says Rose. Huge bureaucracies inadvertently set the stage for serendipitous mistakes. Cassie goes for a relaxing run only to witness a disturbing instance of littering. Plastic bags on the […]
