Webster is a little white duck who rides along on the rearview mirror of my car. He looks like he’s perched on a swing, dangling from a thin cord. On bumpy roads he careens back and forth like he’s holding on for dear life. Other...
By eight in the morning it was already one hundred degrees in Phoenix. I was driving home from dropping the girls at school, the news playing on the radio, the weight of it pressing in. War, cruelty, hate. All of it too much to carry...
If you’ve ever walked across a park or campus and noticed an unplanned trail worn into the grass, you’ve seen a “desire path.” It’s the contrast to the paved walkway, evidence of someone choosing a different route than the one that was laid out. The planners...
When Ella was little, our living room often looked like her Montessori classroom at nap time. She arranged her dolls and stuffed animals lying in careful rows, then laid small blankets across their backs. I can still see her tiptoeing along the carpet, careful not...
There is something both ordinary and extraordinary about the ways we reach for each other. We crave connection to say the things that matter, to share our days, to hear and be heard. A phone has long been one of those places, holding the sound...
It was rush hour in New York City, traffic at a near standstill as a dreary rain soaked the streets. The crosstown bus was filled with people who were cold, tired, and ready to be home. The air felt heavy with impatience. Two men barked...
Ella came home from the bookstore with a little hardback called The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. She flipped through it, reading me words that don’t exist in a typical dictionary but should. One stuck with me. Sonder: the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid...
The placebo effect is one of the most fascinating phenomena in medicine. People often feel better after taking a treatment with no active ingredients, like a sugar pill or saline injection, simply because they believe it might help. For years, it was assumed that belief...
The other day, Emma looked at me and asked, “Are you wearing smaller earrings, or are your ears getting bigger?” I laughed and hurried to the mirror. I was sure it wasn’t the earrings, since they were my usual pair, but I still found myself...
Toad baked some cookies. “These cookies smell very good,” said Toad. He ate one. “And they taste even better,” he said. So begins one of Arnold Lobel’s most memorable Frog and Toad stories. Toad runs to Frog’s house with his freshly baked treats, and before long, the two of them...