During COVID, I shied away from people. I knew what to do, but just didn't get that nudge.
Nudge Me Back to Center
Free Association, Starting with Black
A Tribute to my Brother Charlie Dad, Rog, and Charlie; then Mom, Palsy and me Black white chalky marbly butterscotch swirl bowling ball the sound of a bowling alley the sound of a powerful waterfall falling lacy waters flying insects in the breeze deep blue sky of summer deep lead clouds of summer wet and... Continue Reading →
Tell Me About Your Rescue Dog
Tell me about your rescue dog. Tell me about your pandemic experience. I’ll tell you about my fridge. Tell me about the fort you made from pillows and sheets as a kid. Tell me about the time you made an entire meal from new recipes, trying to make it special. Tell me about your favorite... Continue Reading →
Old Sleeping Bags and their Store of Dreams
Shortly, I will take Mom and Dad’s sleeping bags to the homeless shelter. With a bit of a heavy heart, although I know it will lighten when the deed is done. These bags were well-used over the past 65 years. Mom and Dad used them as blankets in their Quonset hut during their two years... Continue Reading →
Cloud (COVID) Nine (-teen)
Cloud COVID-19 has many forms. Our connectivity means disease can amplify far and wide. As can acts of kindness.
Dancing Forks and Cheese Fondue on Valentine’s Day
Our Valentine's Day tradition started on a whim, but took on meaning of its own--I think.
In the Swim Again
I'm swimming again. In the water, I feel capable. Why not? I’m doing it. My body feels the stretching it is undergoing and the pulls I have accomplished. Currents and eddies pummel my surface. My knuckles graze the lane line more times than I would wish. When I reach the end of a lap, either... Continue Reading →
Legacies of a Housewife and her Scientist Husband, February 1963
February 18, 1963. In less than a month, my family would move from Palo Alto, California to Hanover, New Hampshire where Dad would teach a term at Dartmouth College. Art Lachenbruch was 37, Edie was 35, and Roger, Charlie, and I were 8, 7, and 6 years old. At that moment, Dad was on a... Continue Reading →
A Memorial Party for My Brother Charlie
These stories went from somewhere to somewhere else. And now released, they spin into the lives of those who brought them back and those who sat and listened.
Walk a Mile in My Boot
I’m on Week Five with a walking boot for a stress fracture in my foot. I ice, I take Naprosyn, I go easy on it, and I fall into a rhythm of living with it. It’s not a bad handicap. I’ve had much worse, even in the last year. But a boot is an odd... Continue Reading →
The Raggedy Months of the Year–and Joy beyond Grief
Last weekend at the cabin, everything was raggedy: trees were down, nothing was blooming, appliances were acting up, and roads, boots, ditches, and even our faces were running with cold rain. But, or, as Butt the Hoopoe says in Salman Rushdie’s playful Haroun and the Sea of Stories, “but but but.” But but but for... Continue Reading →
Love and Joy We Share
My friends, how do I love you? I love you as the vibrant pulse of life. I love you as a wild ginger. A bleeding heart. As cactus, cloven, we know not why. And staghorn ferns, as well . As nettles, with their spines we learn to live with. Veronica seed--a heart that follows bloom.... Continue Reading →
The Halo of Hindsight
We walked farther than the dogs needed to because I needed to keep going. In the illumination of a streetlight, I saw concentric circles in the knobby twigs.
Common Sense After My Brother Has Died
People believed we did not have common sense. We crawled through the chaparral over sharp rocks barefoot and in shorts. We stayed out exploring until we could not see where our fingernails ended and our fingers started. We asked too many questions and pushed ourselves in environments that were dangerous and mental realms that were... Continue Reading →
Shutting it Off: Thoughts by Day and by Night
Here’s how you shut it off. You leave town with your husband. You rent a place that has kayaks. You concentrate on figuring out how to pull yours through the sand to the lapping ocean, then on how to get into the plastic shell. Then you row, or paddle, or whatever it is that you... Continue Reading →
“Who is Bob,” I Ask, while Learning of Charlie’s Cancer
This story is about three of the people on this solid earth. This story is about them in the middle of September up until now, and it is about them before that time and after. It is about the people they knew or know or will know, too, and indirectly, it is about the ground... Continue Reading →
Marion’s Casserole
This story is not about Marion’s casserole, but that is where I have to start. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Partially brown a pound of ground beef, then pour off the grease. Scrape the ground beef into a lasagne pan, then pour in a few cups of elbow macaroni. Find the can opener and... Continue Reading →
The Memory Stick of Life, and Why it is Important to Me this Very Minute*
One night on the way to visit my father, I heard about a crime that was allegedly committed by a twenty-year-old man. My first reaction was to be upset: it was none of our business how old he was, or even that it was a “he” and not a “she.” I remembered my reaction when... Continue Reading →
Our Beach Getaway—Insignificance and Significance
My husband, the dogs, and I spent last week at his family’s beach cabin. It’s a modest structure with a flat roof and a lot of history—his family’s history; I married in relatively recently. The cabin sits on top of a cliff above a long narrow beach. The beach’s upper terrace is a strip of... Continue Reading →
Mother Cross-Trains for Old Age; Daughter Pulls Ahead
I think of the eye tests where the ophthalmologist says, “Which one’s better, One or Two?” and I ask to see One again. I try to keep Two in mind as it blinks off and One takes its place. “I can’t tell you,” I say. “It’s all right. Let’s try this,” she says. “Which one’s... Continue Reading →
The Proper Use of Spanish When Visitors Arrive*
When visitors show up, you need to remember these two words: igualmente (likewise, but easier to kick around) and tampoco (me neither but casual, like uh-uh.) Just say them over and over, and then get ready to drop them as your guests began to talk. “I’m so glad to be home,” someone says. Actually, I... Continue Reading →
Dogs: What Are They Thinking? Sundance Joins our Home but Holds his Mysteries
Dogs: what are they thinking? What keeps them in check, what lets them break loose? Who are they, each of these canines who live beside us, who we live beside, who drive our love machines? We got possession of an almost four-year-old dog* about five weeks ago, named Sundance. His personalities are as varied as... Continue Reading →
Musings on Retirement and Transitions on the Occasion of my 40th College Reunion
In the weeks leading up to my 40th college reunion, I started musing about Barb now and Barb back then. I collected my few mementos: a yearbook, the freshman book with all of our high school photos in it, and a set of peach-colored towels that we are still using. I considered the astonished Barb... Continue Reading →
Back Then, We Had Stubbed Toes
Letter to my boyfriend after my junior year of college. I had just returned to California for the summer from Pennsylvania by Greyhound bus, May 29, 1977. My kids don’t know what a stubbed toe, a stubbed heel, or a scraped knee is, really. They understand the concept, but they aren’t even sure how you’d... Continue Reading →
Springs, Harmonic Motion, and the Zen of Recording First Flowering Date
Some time last year, the plants around our cabin started grabbing atoms from the air and soil. They jammed them together, then used solar energy to stick them into molecules that were no longer gas or liquid, but were solid. For the rest of the growing season, the plants doled out those molecules to whatever... Continue Reading →
Be Ludic
ludic (adjective): (Of play) spontaneous and without purpose; (of behavior) undirected and spontaneously playful. I need the occasional ludic break to get through the day. Ludic is running through the park with a young son. Ludic is playing tug-of-war with the dog. Ludic is arranging blueberries on the rim of my plate; it’s humming or... Continue Reading →
Who Goes There? Reflections on What We Don’t Know and Therefore Miss
Who goes there? I am usually too ignorant to even know someone is passing by. And when I do pay attention, I am astonished to learn the extent of transit, variety of travelers, and breadth of cargo that moves in my neighborhood. I live near a residential home for women in rehabilitation, and I see... Continue Reading →
What She Isn’t (Fiction Out-Take from My Novel, Nettle Soup)
“Why do you have to step in the mud?” Sharon complained over the drone of the generator. She had come to the door to greet Delmita, but now glared at the imprint of Delmita’s boot in the February mud. “Because I kind of like walking through it,” Delmita said. “Course, not that I want... Continue Reading →
How is a Visit Nice? Why Do I Want to See You?
A week from today I will go to Thailand to visit my daughter who lives there. We often talk on phones or computers a few times a week, and we message and use e-mail. There are periods when I think we are caught up, and periods in which we lose track altogether. I cannot wait... Continue Reading →
The Pursuit of Simplicity, and the Alphabet in Nature
Challenge: Take photos of all the letters of the alphabet in nature. Do not move except to get the camera into position. Do not alter images other than cropping them. See what I learn from the challenge. Outcomes: A bunch of photos. Pleasure while pondering views and images. Skills in photography. Skills in imagining features... Continue Reading →
Meet the Grandchillas, My Surrogate Grandkids
My son and his wife have been together for almost eight years. For the moment, and maybe forever, they have no human kids, but they do have five chinchillas. When their winter-break sitter fell through, they asked if I would step in. And I knew: it was time to get to know my grandchillas. They... Continue Reading →
Projects, Quests, and the Intensity of Life (Or Nettles, Part II)
When I was twenty, I took a year away from college. I was a Californian, but I’d been going to a small, extremely intense liberal arts college in the East, and it felt right to leave for somewhere for a while. My first move was to France for a semester abroad. I recall that our... Continue Reading →
A Smile like a Sunbreak on a Winter Day: Family and my New Granddaughter Roz
When she opens into a smile, I feel like the sun breaks through a cloud.
But Vacation Means Missing My Dog
We’ve been on vacation in Hawai’i for two weeks, and in spite of wondrous experiences, I miss my dog. Birds and flowers are impossibly red. Fish, which slosh back and forth in my mind even when I close my eyes, look to be designed by children with fabric scraps and no instruction on practicality. With... Continue Reading →
Seven Great Things about NORGs
1. NORGs are well-meaning. Nice Old Retired Guys gave me lots of advice. I was NORGed for all of the nineteen years when I was the only female faculty member in my department, which shows that NORGs don’t actually target young faculty, just faculty who were younger than them. If I closed my door so... Continue Reading →
I Find a Familiar Plant, and Old Friends Tumble By
I found an old friend at the cabin this weekend. I’d known it first from the California chaparral when I was growing up. I would have brought a sprig to the house, crinkling my nose at its medicinal smell. I’d have pored over my field guide, skipped the italics, and called it “yerba buena.” Its... Continue Reading →
Brothers Tell Lies But Speak the Truth
I had to grease our tractor this morning because a while ago we had it hauled to the shop--65 miles each way--and the guy said we’d save a lot of money if we’d grease it. And also because it spent three weeks in a formerly unknown slough, which had the result of us getting to... Continue Reading →
Barb Lachenbruch 