With Halloween only a few days away, a little boy was getting some extra use out of his lion costume. He sat in the child seat at the front of a red plastic Target cart, zipped into the tawny suit, the shaggy mane framing his......
During my sophomore year of college, I spent the fall semester studying in London. By December, the weather was cold and rainy, and I was tired, burned out by the demands of classes, and missing home. One afternoon, I wandered into St. Paul’s Cathedral. It......
At a table near mine, a mother was deciding between a cup or a bowl of butternut squash soup. She asked her little girl if she might want some, too. “I don’t like soup!” The girl said it with the disbelief of someone who could......
John Steinbeck considered East of Eden the book he had been preparing to write his whole life. Published in 1952, it was enormous in scope: a story about two families, but also about good and evil, love and rejection, freedom and responsibility, and what it means to......
There is a French phrase, bibliothèque intérieure, describing the inner library each of us carries through life. It is more than what we remember. Its shelves hold what we have read and heard and lived, and what we have gathered from the people we have known.......
A few weeks ago, I had knee surgery. I expected a few uncomfortable days and a fairly quick return to normal. Instead, I woke up to a more complicated repair and four weeks without putting weight on my left leg. My mom cuts jasmine from......
Our eyes sit only a few inches apart, and they never see exactly the same thing. Each takes in the world from its own position. Shift those few inches and an edge appears, something moves into view, something else disappears behind it. Our brains receive......
When the girls were little, they would sit on the kitchen counter while I made dinner, their small fingers peeling the papery skin from cloves of garlic. I would hand them another clove, then another, and they would drop the peeled ones into a little......
There is something about finding a book you once read to your children over and over again. You remember the illustrations before you open it. You can almost feel the weight of a small body beside you. I was sorting through old books recently when......
Since Dolly Parton died this week, there have been so many stories about the things she gave away. Books. Scholarships. Money after wildfires. A million dollars that found its way into the research behind a vaccine. Millions more, over a lifetime, finding their way into......
