An e-zine about spaceships, aliens, science, memory, motherhood, magic, and cats.
We gave the six-year-old a scooter for Christmas. This seemed like a reasonable choice.
But today… they’re designing a whole new house that they want to build for it, centered around a scooter cabinet, and a few blocks away. Their plans involve taking our refrigerator. Continue reading “Scooters and Rabbit Cookies”
by Mary E. Lowd
Originally published in Fantasia Divinity Magazine, January 2018
A hundred-some baby geese wandered through the field of mint. Shanna watched them from the river’s edge where she was busy washing the kitchen rags and tablecloths. She’d heard stories about geese who laid golden eggs and brothers transformed into swans, but she had no brothers who’d gone missing, and when she finished with the washing, she found no glints of gold hidden in the mint. Only a smooth, round stone that felt nice in her hand, so she slipped it into her pocket. Continue reading “Geese and Gingerbread”
Sometimes you can be a 10x better parent if you can just get away for two hours and write 1000 words about having adventures on a spaceship.
Taking melatonin, because Christmas morning is basically a different time zone.
The twelve-year-old: “My acapella group is doing a Pentatonix song.”
Me: “Oh? Which one?”
Twelve, sings: “Taaaaaake oooooon meeeee!” Continue reading “Pentatonix Cover of “Take On Me””
Maybe it’s just the random sampling I’ve happened to select this week, but as a genre, Christmas movies do not seem to make a strong argument for spending time with family.
“Therapy is for people who want to be in each other’s lives. We don’t have that problem.” Continue reading “Fred Claus”
That feeling when you’re just so glad that your dog is feeling enough better to bark his head off at the vacuum cleaner, even if it does make the house very noisy.
Okay, so neither of them is good, but…
Deck the Halls >>>> Christmas with the Kranks
The six-year-old: “We should make gingerbread men!”
The twelve-year-old: “Gingerbread PEOPLE.”
Me, a furry: “Anthro gingerbread.”
There is such an immense difference between knowing your dog will die — eventually, as all dogs do, probably even sometime in the next five years — and thinking that your dog will die sometime in the next few days.
I am so glad to have returned to the former state. Continue reading “Tidbits About Dogs, Reading, and Movies”
Here’s the thing about Howard the Duck—as far as I can tell, people must mostly hate it because they’re squicked by the very tame human/duck romance, because it’s otherwise a pretty standard 80s movie.
BUT that duck is WAY nicer to the human lead than any of the human men are. Continue reading “Howard the Duck”
The kids have invented a game — climb into a dark closet, assemble a costume by feel, and then come out dressed in an amusing mix of over-large coats, mismatched shoes, scarves, gloves, and whatever else they can find.
There is laughter coming from the closet.