He puts his roots down in the dirt and calls it home, starting out short and nubby and ending up long and curvy, nutrient-rich and sweet. She scoops out hunks of the dirt, handfuls of sand, and calls it fun, with fingernails and fingertips as confirmation. She makes park pies from carefully picked weeds, fallen leaves, a sprinkle of grass, and a handful of dirt, stirred together with a short stick. The dirt for the long skinny carrot, well, I’d like that dirt to be organic, I decided after having Hal. The dirt and the fields and the parks Hal plays in, well, I never really thought about it until last summer while visiting Stonyfield, makers of our favorite plain whole milk yogurt. You can read more about that trip here, the trip that convinced me to cancel our synthetic fertilizer for our small patch of grass.  Read more

Emotions are high this morning, making it a good day to write about intimacy and the internet, a conversation I keep coming back to, a conversation I’d love for you to inject your thoughts into. It’s the first day of kindergarten for Hal. This morning was piled high with anxiety, hers and mine for her, with comforting southern buttermilk biscuits, with a clump of toilet paper in the toilet from a single 5-year-old sneeze, with dishes leftover from last night’s boxed mac and cheese (or mackin’ as she calls it) and caesar salad, the back-to-school dinner she requested, with lots of sweet smiles, too. I have the quintessential first-day-of-school pictures on my phone, plus a quick video we took before hopping in the car. And I find myself asking a question that’s become so familiar over the past 2 years, what do I share on the internet? Do I share our most intimate moments, like the one above? When I choose to share them, do they lose their intimacy? I’m 100% certain they do, and entirely unsure at the same time. Read more