The notebook
Seasonal Journal
Nine essays about yards, weather, routine, memory, and the things that change while we're busy looking somewhere else.
Browse by season
Entry 01 · Spring
The Grass Was Taller Than Yesterday
Overnight the lawn gained a kind of confidence I had not approved. I measured it the way I measure everything I am late to: against a memory that had already started lying to protect my pride.
Read EntryEntry 02 · Spring
Sprinklers Before Sunrise
They start in the dark, which feels like either devotion or a timer with no moral life. I listen from bed and try to decide whether care that I do not witness still counts as care.
Read EntryEntry 03 · Spring
The Patch Near The Fence
There is always one place the water forgets. I have named it, resented it, and walked across it so often that the pale grass has become a kind of ongoing correspondence.
Read EntryEntry 04 · Early summer
What Summer Leaves Behind
Heat does not simply arrive here. It edits. By May the yard is already keeping a record of what survived, what browned, and what I pretended not to see.
Read EntryEntry 05 · Early summer
The Hose Nobody Put Away
It stays on the concrete in the shape of an interrupted sentence. Heat makes it smell faintly of summer and of all the tasks that almost happened.
Read EntryEntry 06 · High summer
Every Yard Has A Quiet Corner
Behind the oak, where leaves collect and the fence goes a little soft with shade, there is a place that refuses to perform for the street. I have started preferring it.
Read EntryEntry 07 · High summer
Rain Changed Everything Overnight
The weeds treated the storm like an engraved invitation. By morning the yard had a new plot, and I had lost the argument I did not know I was having.
Read EntryEntry 08 · High summer
The Neighborhood Sounded Different On Saturdays
The mowers start like a shared nervous system. I used to sleep through that sound. Now I hear it as a census of who is keeping up and who is writing instead.
Read EntryEntry 09 · High summer
It Was Never Really About The Lawn
After a season of looking, I have to admit the grass was only the most visible version of a quieter problem: how to live in a place without going numb to it.
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