Same here!

Oh wonderful! Thank you

How wonderful. The old machines were all metal, and thus they just didn't break as often, and when they were properly oiled and cared for, could last several lifetimes. I have an 1910s typewriter that I am also loving right now.

Day 3: the light at the golden hour is sometimes actually pinkish.

SO HANDSOME. The one my great-grandmother bought wasn't precisely this model because it also had a backstitch, but I that seems a quibble, given how hard this photo hit. Having seen a booklet of all the models available, they all had the same paint job, and just slightly different features.

Fortunately, they're all pretty much peel-and-stick, so if we ever get someone with a little more sense in office, they can be removed with a little elbow grease, a spackle knife, and some goo gone.

That makes perfect sense!

OH! In our house the story is that the machine "would sew through anything, including a yardstick," which was not speculation but proven fact.

That, like so many outdated things, this machine that worked perfectly for at least 60 years was given away before you were old enough to say "I'll take it." Gone the way of the jell-o cookbook & the ouija board & countless other items no one ever expected would one day be treasured heirlooms. 4/3

And in telling this story, you further realize that you learned to sew on a machine that your great-grandmother stretched her budget to afford in the leanest of times the family ever knew. That your hands used what her hands had used, only you never knew it then. 3/4

Because you grew up with your mother using that exact machine, which she'd inherited from her mother. Who'd inherited it from HER mother, you now know—bc the great-grandmother's diary that's the basis for the novel you're currently writing records payments she made on this machine in late-1926. 2/4

She and I have been zoom writing buddies since spring break of 2020, when we decided that since we were stuck in our houses, we should close our office doors, hang a "not at home" sign on them for our children & pretend we were on a writing retreat far away from dirty dishes. We still meet weekly!

The idea accommodations are handed out like candy on Halloween is absurd. We shld worry about the systemic failure of No Child Left Behind creating culture of "accountability" that=NOT teaching long texts in favor of excerpt-information-extraction, not abt the success of making education accessible.

Doubly infuriating because anecdotal "parents in Scarsdale" stuff can easily be contradicted by anecdotal parents-I've-actually-known, whose kids not only had an EXTREMELY high bar to pass to get a 504 plan or an IEP, but whose kids with one couldn't, for example, get extra time on tests like ACT.

Day 2: I stepped outside, and the air was filled with sparkles—miniscule snowflakes bopping against my cheeks, sticking in my eyelashes, and filling my path with glints of light. When it's 16⁰ and sunny, with snow in the trees, the whole world glitters.

You absolutely should. It's making me want to write a new piece, along the lines of the one I wrote last year, about how the humanities give us stories and vision to understand things we otherwise wouldn't in medicine and other sciences.

Right? I can't get it out of my head.