Skipping Town

This week, on a beautiful false-spring Monday, the girls told me they want to put their American Girl dolls into storage and turn the “former AG room” in the finished basement into a “teen hangout.” “We’re not really into the AGs anymore,” Lucia explained. So blase. The dolls that have been their constant companions for four years are now to be packed away, their clothes and accessories tidied and placed in bins. Lucia visibly reacted to the image of the dolls in bins, and backtracked, saying no, instead she’ll dress them nicely and put them on a shelf. Greta asked if we could store the dolls within reach, just in case they want to pull them out and play with them “for a few minutes.” The long hours and days of setting up schoolrooms and elaborate meals and carefully posed circles of all the dolls with their small plastic hands resting on one another’s shoulders--all of it is over. “For a few minutes”--like a secret. Like a glance backward. Like a quick reflection of girls they soon wo...

I recently had the occasion to tell Lucia and Greta about my longstanding love of five-subject notebooks. I’ve always been an organized person, and for many many tween and teen years I kept all of my written material in one place--a five-subject notebook. These notebooks contained everything: stories, poems, drawings, handwriting experiments, and lots and lots of lists. Things I Bought (with prices), Movies I Saw, Books I Read, Things To Buy. Dashed-off notes and spirited, passive-aggressive “letters” to Molly, blathering on about nonsense and demanding she write a letter back. (I must have shown her these letters in the notebook, rather than tear them out.) Most of these “letters” consisted of sentences like, “I am practicing my handwriting. My handwriting is smooth and even. Do you think I have beautiful handwriting? I think my handwriting is amazing.” I can easily call these sentences to mind because last week I looked through some of these notebooks with Lucia. I have them all, of ...

Every day, I contemplate getting another pet. [Author’s note: If you are Andrew, please stop reading.] This feeling of needing to expand the animal portion of our family has been going on for several years. When we got Farrah in 2019, we talked often of getting another doodle; in the years since, we’ve seen many available doodles that have captured our hearts, have even come close to driving to New Jersey to snag one. This is the curse of continuing to follow Farrah’s breeder on Instagram: a constant parade of adorable puppies. Our desire to have a second doodle was never shared by Farrah, which she demonstrated by her extreme reaction to Molly’s visiting dogs this Christmas. Farrah is our queen, and she does not deign to share her throne. She is meant to be an only doodle. That is clear. What’s less clear is whether Nutmeg would like a bun-pal. She seems pretty content, but I know she must be lonely, being alone all day in Greta’s room. She demanded to be a full-time free-roam bunny (...