jennifersharvey's Blog

• Sealed

  August 4, 2009

  • Earlier today, you would have found me cross-legged on Elle’s bedroom floor, folding the top flaps of a box together with one hand, holding packing tape in the other. Sealing away for a few weeks some of the odds and ends that string together the life of an eight year old girl. As I ran the tape across the top of the box, I noticed familiar writing, the boxy all-caps print that belongs to my ...
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• A river (and maybe a road or two) runs through it

  May 31, 2009

  • Just now, I was taping up a box of books and spotted my copy of A River Runs Through It. It’s one of my favorite books, and I read it for the first time (the whole thing in one sitting, on a wicker sofa on a screened-in porch on Nantucket) in September 1992. The movie came out the following month. When I pulled the book from the box and opened the front cover, a folded piece of paper fell into ...
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• What We Take

  May 22, 2009

  • They pile into the car, arms full of backpacks and folders and reports cards. The word goodbye fresh on their lips. As I navigate the school parking lot, I adjust my rearview mirror so that it fills with their two faces. Today would be a tough day, I knew that much. The last day of school, their last day at this school. Elle* broke first. “I’m going to miss her,” she cries out. Tears. “Do ...
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• Answer

  May 19, 2009

  • I was in the middle of nowhere, but I felt as though I had arrived at someplace important and pivotal. A place that should show on some map of my life with the words Go here. Heavy and golden, the moonlight sank to earth on a parachute of stars and brought everything around me out of the shadows - the hulking shapes of mountains, open space, a black ribbon of road. Far away, the light of one ...
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• Scribes

  May 8, 2009

  • How she remembers it after all this time, I couldn’t tell you. In Indiana, not far from where we used to live, there’s a county road with a few miles of great hills - the kind that when you drive over them (a little above the speed limit, necessarily) make your stomach leap and fall. My daughter loves that feeling, and begs to drive on roads like that. My son does not, which is ...
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