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Two Years Without Purpose
Two years ago, on the morning before a new year and a new chapter, I sat in front of the woodstove without plan or purpose. I watched the light come up over the White Mountains, painting the sky with strokes of lavender, orange, and pink, before muddling the canvas grey. A snowstorm was on the […]
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Growing and Gardening
In Vermont, sowing a vegetable garden in spring is part of the curriculum, like stacking wood in the summer, raking fall leaves, and or shoveling snow. And yet, I’d felt only ambivalence about the soil where so many others found solace, joy, and purpose.
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Challenge Accepted
Like the quarries I was warned about, the Internet is murky and perilous; it’s also seductive. Jumping in on a trend can be fun or risky. We don’t always know what is accurate or safe to share, and frankly, the effort to investigate everything before posting is too much work. But when the popular kids are already in the water, do take time to measure the depth and check for obstacles, or just jump?
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Write Before Waking | Reflections from a Maine Writing Retreat
It’s always been a little fantasy of mine to have a writer’s cottage by the ocean. Despite this summer’s necessary virtual reality of online learning, I went to Maine anyway—to be by myself, to find the writing.
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Masks, but make it fashion.
Twice a year, I turn over my closet. In the spring, I pack away wool sweaters and attempt to iron the wrinkles out of linen pants and cotton dresses and hang them ready to wear. In the winter, I reverse the process. It’s a habit born from too many clothes and not enough closet space, […]
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Reinvention Part II: Shoulda-woulda-coulda
No doubt, we all have a long list of “shoulda-woulda-couldas.” Looking back at whatever might “have been” is to examine forces over which I now have no control. It is, in fact, too late to be what I might have been, and I’m okay with that.
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Reinvention Part 1: Taylor Swift, Jennifer Lopez, and Me
On Saturday I watched Miss Americana, the new Taylor Swift documentary on Netflix. In it, Taylor bemoans, “We exist in this society where women in entertainment are discarded in an elephant graveyard by the time they are 35.” And yet, the next day, on Superbowl Sunday, there was 50-year old Jennifer Lopez putting on an […]
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Whatever I want
As I unclipped Rangeley’s leash at doggy daycare yesterday morning, I wondered, as I usually do, what must they think? “She doesn’t have a job. What does she do all day that she can’t take care of the dog?” Brushing off the imagined judgment, I tick through the items on my to-do list. It’s not […]
Catherine H Palmer
Writing about life, in the middle of it.
Catherine H Palmer 