An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Looking for souvenirs to take back to your lovers, to prove you thought about them once in the midst of heat, toil, and hardly thinking about them at all? I recommend rebar. I recommend marbles. I recommend shards of shingles, nineteenth-century medicine bottles, forks, mountains of old bricks hoisted from the dirt, as if a whole other city had been built beneath this grass and sodded over. Keep your prize finds, a shelf of rust and porcelain and plastic, as if an archaeologist might one day stop by.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
We compliment his lovely plumage. “Color doesn’t matter,” Laurel says, even though this is the only quality that strikes a newcomer at all—how pretty that dusty gray one is! What a fine burgundy comb! Foolish are the uninitiated.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
She’s an 1897 Steinway Model A, with flowerpot legs and a music stand that rises from the keys in a tangle of filigreed wood. When I first arrived, we glanced at each other across the room for a while, me with idle hands, her with tantalizing hinges. I couldn’t resist. I hoisted open the heavy lid.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Church steeples still lay on the ground, blue tarps turned homes into extensions of the sea. A human’s arms cannot encompass that loss. We make small boxes instead; we attempt to foil fate, we laugh, and we wait.
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Below the quilt is a daybed where I would lie as a child when I was sick or restless, or just wanted my mother’s company as she worked. The lower reaches of the menagerie have become as familiar as my hand. The cricket—that cricket. Satin-stitched thorax and abdomen in brown thread on an ivory field, with legs and antennae spronging out in stem stitch. Who asked for the cricket? Was it a child?
An installment in our weekly series, The By and By.
Though we already had two hundred miles under our belts, that morning felt like the first real leg, the leg with daylight and sights, with the fresh feeling of a Prius on an open road: snacks uneaten, podcasts not yet listened to, the journey still limitless. Of course, as experienced readers know, travel hubris is a dangerous thing.
