June 20, 2020
We have a vocabulary for the easy season.
With the solstice, we slip into summer speak, like saying, “yes, please,” to the offer of a cold glass, sweating on a hot afternoon.
Summer’s lexicon of languor has an optimistic tone, borne of school-free days and chill-free nig...
May 11, 2019
The women who are most paramount in our lives are often also the least knowable, which makes them rich subject matter for a book.
In the new anthology, “Mothers and Strangers: Essays on Motherhood from the New South,” (University of North Carolina Pr...
May 9, 2019
Photo montage: Jo Powers
They say his mother kept the gun safe in his bedroom.
Socially isolated, video-game obsessed, and a child of divorce, he went to sleep every night and awoke each morning beside a weapons cupboard until the day he got out of bed and killed 26 inno...
October 1, 2015
Years ago, my childhood friend Susan, a blond, broad cheekboned Finnish girl (like many in her native Copper Country), told me about their tradition of taking saunas followed by a bracing dip in the frigid Great Lake. Her family had moved from Michigan’s Upper Peninsu...
November 16, 2014
The screws are stored in what looks like a wooden card catalogue. The floors are wood, too, as is the wide staircase leading to the second-floor housewares department. Overhead, fan belts are displayed where the wall meets the tin ceiling.
Stepping through the door of...
November 1, 2014
Photo: Spencer Olinek
Doris peered up at the three-story high ceiling and zigzagging staircase angling toward the rooftop, a timid smile on her face as she scanned the vertical volume of her grandson’s loft.
Frail and 92, she lived her dimming days in the confines of...
October 11, 2014
Finally got a chance to stop in at Literati Bookstore on Washington in downtown Ann Arbor.
On Saturday, we stepped away from the maize-and-blue pre-game sidewalk crowd and found welcome respite in Literati’s airy space. With its wide selection of literary journals and...
June 12, 2014
Subdivision Painting: Jo Powers
We know them by the dogs they walk, the flowers they fancy, the schedules they keep, the newspapers they read and the color combinations they prefer on siding and trim.
On trash days, we witness their household castoffs and glimpse evide...