It may be a season of love, but there’s a side to love that we all know better than we’d like: rejection. There are the dreams that don’t choose us back. There are the ways in which we self-reject, never letting ourselves feel the beauty of the actual but imperfect. And there are the rejections that lead us, mercifully, away from what we were never meant to have and towards the essential. Whatever the case, rejection is a powerful instrument that guides each of us, willingly or no, and our authors this month reflect on its gravity and serendipity in their lives.
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I remembered the tree and the tree remembered me
We sat in the car, a full country’s length away from our normal. Years of marital problems had come to a head in the preceding weeks and, after an agreement to work on these problems and an understanding that they weren’t going to be solved overnight, nearly tangible tentativeness and awkwardness hung in the air…
Snap peas
Reject the notion that you are not enough. Or that you are too much. Or that you don’t have what it takes. Reject all the lies that you are tempted to believe, and begin the adventure of knowing that it’s okay to be you, exactly as you are now, in your shoes, in your skin,…
The ones we keep choosing
Last week I opened an email that began, “Unfortunately, Joanna, you did not win…” It was lottery tickets to see Hamilton, which just opened in Seattle. The tickets have been at scalper’s prices since like five seconds after they went on sale. This lottery is my best hope of seeing what some have called the…
It’s basically a muffin
I sat at my computer, staring at the screen, heart palpitating with my pinkie resting firmly on the delete button. My eyeballs danced frantically over each sentence again and again as I dissected every word. Ugh, why did I say it that way? I thought. Why did I use so many parentheses? All the other…
The things she handed down
Years ago my aunts put together a photocopied version of my Italian grandma’s recipe notebook. I didn’t live in the same state with her growing up and my non-Italian mom only cooked the recipes that my dad liked from his childhood. So coming upon these hand-written recipes as an adult feels a bit like a…
Kindred 