My 83 year-old mother texted me the other day to ask if I had a Dremel tool. I was surprised she knew what one was, and I would have been inclined to put the question down to incipient dementia except I knew she had recently made an impulse buy of
When my son was very young, my parents and sister had a tendency to buy gifts for him that were for a much older child, a tendency owed to some combination of unfamiliarity or forgotten experience with small children (which I shared until I had my own) and projection of
We had Mother's Day dinner at my mom's, and conversation briefly turned to a Japanese-ish print hanging on the wall behind her kitchen table. It depicts a small group of houses with rooflines done in a recognizably Asian caligraphic swoosh, arranged in a series of rows
If there's one thing that is truly held in common by all those who fall under the heading 'American,' it's the obsession with making and remaking our homes and the landscapes they're embedded in. Building, renovating, decorating and redecorating, planting and mowing
I recently bought a well-used pickup, a real work truck: 8' bed, no extended cab, 4x4. I want to be able to haul shit, literally (manure for the garden) and metaphorically, and this is the beast for it. One of the first things I hauled was a load of
The Language of Houses author Alison Lurie references Frank Lloyd Wright's claim that what we want in our home spaces is the right combination of opportunities for "perching and nesting." And she cites Gerry Griswold's Feeling Like a Kid in observing that the nesting
In a stretch of the Ohio river spanned by several bridges I used to regularly cross, including the one where I once held up a river-span's worth of traffic because I was unable to get my mom's stick-shift Saturn into gear when the traffic light that
If my dam work hadn't occurred where it did, it's unlikely that I would have come across a particularly interesting early 12th century theologian of Augustinian tendencies and French situation (though perhaps not origin), Hugh of St. Victor. Bear with me, for the connections between my
Some kinds of rock spark deep feelings: the gemmier sort, of course, but also many that are dull or at least less lustrous. I would wager, though, that not many share my deep attachment to sandstone. It's admittedly on the boring, sedimentary side of things (as perhaps am
Yesterday I finished putting up braces in our new garage to store the salvaged and scrap lumber left from its build. The old garage had stood for close to a century, illegally as far as I can tell from the initial title we received a copy of when we purchased