All through the spring and summer of 2023, I had rabbits on the brain. It began with an urge to re-read Watership Down, one of my all-time favorite novels. And then, I started seeing rabbits everywhere I went. In particular, there was one who would appear in the community garden where I have a large plot, who would stay near me in stillness while I worked away. I named it Hazel after the main character in Watership Down and marveled that it did not seem concerned about m

I left my marriage by degrees in a process that took years from start to finish. We’d decided to separate at the beginning of COVID, and because of everything happening plus issues with illness in the family, we lived in the same house. I lived upstairs, he lived downstairs. We shared a kitchen. Obviously, there was a lot of “family life” happening but we were physically and emotionally severed from each other. It took over three years from the point of initial separa

As a child, I was mostly silent. Even as a baby, or so the family lore went. “It was creepy, you’d never even cry,” said my mother. But I did cry. As I got older and my anxieties grew and my destiny as an everywhere outcast confronted me. I cried a lot. I was anguished, often thinking of death and making complicated plans of escape to live in solitude before I was even ten. There was never any place I could be safe unless I was entirely alone. Everywhere I went, I wa