We arrive at our farm-stay by late afternoon. We’re going to stay on a farm, we’ve told the kids with the kind of enthusiasm that works on toddlers, or like we’re impersonating telemarketers trying...

August is closing out this spree of carefree summer days, of spontaneous plans welling up from the abyss of unstructured time; and the equal joy of having no plans, the kids sprawled about reading...

The thought comes to me like a message from a burning bush, from someplace beyond my mind’s usual mundane chatter. Col is in Washington, D.C., with his grandma. Rose is inside reading Harry...

We’re gathered for dinner in our hot house, closed up as a barrier against the smoke that fills the Animas Valley by night, creeping down from the 416 Fire like an escaped thief as we sleep. The...

We are just entering the seasonal festival that is flowering trees. First fruit trees, now lilacs. I’ve been mesmerized from our upstairs windows, mesmerized on the ground, mesmerized on the...

It’s 8 p.m. on a weeknight, which means we should be ushering small people through the stations of winding down: read aloud, teeth-brushing, pajamas and, ultimately, the long, one-way march toward...

It’s Sunday, and I’m craving some family time, the magical kind where we’re all grateful to be together, feeling close and enjoying the same activity, which is precisely the one I have chosen. I...

It’s Saturday morning, that day that tends to unspool in generous unboundedness, buffered as it is from any whiff of the work and school week. Except the kids woke up bickering and seem committed...

Monday night, Dan and his buddies are gathered in the solarium for their biweekly “bow-night,” in which a group of guys, wielding metal rasps and sandpaper, craft primitive bows out of tree trunks....

Rosie and I are leaving the Christmas Farmers Market, our bags plump with beets, potatoes and carrots. A raven croaks from a nearby rooftop, eager to be the beneficiary of holiday crumbs. “I’m sooo...

We’re in Grand Junction on an immaculately green, mega soccer-field complex hemmed in by coffee-colored hills. Rose’s team is warming up, which is an elaborate ritual consisting of ball-passing...