Opinion
How to Know if Your Child is Ready for a Pet
At every opportunity, my children try to add an animal to the farm. It doesn’t matter if it’s a chicken or a chinchilla, they’ll try to tuck it under their sweater and sneak it into the house. I’m a softie,…
How We Keep Our Hobby Farm Organized & Clean
If you don’t count the first five years of my life, I am a country kid. I mean, my access to animals was limited, but we did live beside a farm, so I spent a lot of time trying to…
2024: Resolutions for Old Wood Hollow Farm
I don’t usually do resolutions. Honestly, it’s been tricky to focus on anything concretely in the past, not knowing which way we were headed as a family—we’ve lived a transient life so far, with my other half building a business…
On Writing the Hard Things
I have been afraid of writing heavy things for a long time. I truly believe that the gritty parts of me will make me less of a human. Less relatable. A duck with nothing in a row. I’d rather pen…
The Conjuring of a Motherhood
The most prevalent thing in my life right now is motherhood—the texture of it, the joy, the exhaustion. Sometimes it is hard to imagine that there is anything else. Before I had children, I had inklings of a career. I…
The Unmaking of a Farm
Have you ever wanted to hold on to something that brought you to tears? Maybe it made you bleed. Perhaps it was dangerous. Or how about this: every day that you did it reminded you of how bloody futile morality…
Opinion: The Problem with Being an Anglophone in Quebec
In 1991, I crossed the Ontario border into Quebec strapped into the back of my social worker’s grey sedan. We lurched down the highway, rolling through the changing foliage into the mouth of the Appalachian Mountains, coasting into the Eastern…
Slow Down. You’re Doing Fine.
This week, my husband and I celebrated nine years together. He scooped me away for the night, sans little ones, to one of our more sentimental destinations, Lake Placid. We looked so forward to it: a lake view from a…
May Essay: On Why I Chose Country Living
I’ve always had my life mapped out. I used to plan it out as a way to put myself to sleep-to drive myself forward. I designed it as I slept, a world where everything could be certain. Where everything was…
The Reality of Catching COVID
I thought I had dodged it. I was so far removed from the realities of COVID in our country utopia that I could very nearly pretend that it wasn’t a part of my world. When in reality, I think it…
