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Half Light

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The first and only haircut I have given was to my mother, and because we were both nervous I took my time setting up a single-seat beauty parlor in her room at the hospital in Las Cruces, New Mexico.

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The Book And The Baby

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Exactly one week before my first book came out, my daughter weaned and potty trained. She did this in a day. After months, maybe even a year, of my hand-wringing about a possible eternity of diapers, about when and how to perfectly ease her off the boob, she woke up one morning and became a kid.

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Failing at Important Things: A Parallel History

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The sunset glowed in ribbons behind the Rockies to the west, backlighting the tractor as it chugged slowly along, and it was hard not to feel hopeful about the whole enterprise. We believed we could create something better for ourselves, for our children, by trying to become smaller, live simpler, love the land and each other more fiercely.

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Family Trees

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My grandfather, a young boy in a red coat wandering the deep and snowy Lithuanian woods, found a litter of wolf cubs in a hollowed oak that had been rent by lightning. He placed the abandoned pups in the hood of his coat and carried them home, where he raised them, or he let them go, or he began a new narrative of our family inextricably linked ever after with white and quiet woods, with dogs, with hollowness sometimes filled by something unexpected. Soon after, he moved to Warsaw, where he stayed and where I, eventually, came from.

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