I feel like I’ve been holding out on you, dear readers. A weekend in March, just before I began this blog, something happened that I haven’t shared with you—the incident, in fact, that renewed my determination to get better and convinced me to start this blog. *** When whitewater paddling…
Thunder in the distance tonight sounds like trembling. And the recliner is shuddering because my dog, Cleo, is hiding underneath the footrest. Sometimes Cleo will go outside in the thunder, even though thunder—or rain, which suggests the prospect of thunder—terrifies her if she’s in the house. I wonder if this…
In my recliner, absorbed in an essay by one of my friends in the most recent issue of the Gettysburg Review, I felt a jolt of pain. Maybe I brushed my hand or the literary magazine across my ribcage. It felt like a bruise. I pushed on the area. How…
I was getting jostled in my whitewater solo canoe in the swirly eddy next to gate 11 of the slalom course when it occured to me, This is my problem in my life: staring at an obstacle I know I can negotiate, but don’t trust myself to make the move.…
“How could you have race stomach when we don’t even know yet if we’re going to race?” W asks me, looking at my uneaten oatmeal. We’re headed up to the Hudson River Whitewater Derby with a tandem canoe on top of the truck, not sure what the river will look…
W has picked a route home from the whitewater slalom race in Maine on mostly back roads. After we exit the first stretch of interstate he says I should tell him when I’m ready to drive. It occurs to me that I can have a non-stressful ride just taking in…
It feels like I am clinging to shore above a massive waterfall. My heart pounds against my life jacket, the paddle slips in my clammy hands, and my limbs have turned into silicone replicas which don’t make any promises to follow my brain’s commands. W in his bright orange canoe…
