Ducks, Newburyport

by Lucy Ellmann

dream

Dream about a stick

Ohio,

The Ohio River

the fact that he loves facts,

The reason for "the fact that"?

To her kittens,

Lioness: kittenhood

the fact that he wears a ratty old green cardigan when he’s manning the phone in the taxi office, just so you know how lousy his life is, and then he forgets the olives and his wife gets mad, and meanwhile he’s having all these headaches and stomach aches, the fact that the son watches noisy cowboy shows, and on the walls of their home are all these posters of foreign places they never get to go to, the fact that even his old football’s kind of deflated, sitting on the mantelpiece,

DFW sentence

TV pundits are always offering advice you never even asked for, the kind of advice you’d only need if you’d been in prison for thirty years, like what shoes to wear,

Such a good observation on pundits

the fact that madeleines are like little memory sticks, but when you bite into one you get closure, the fact that I get the kids to help make them, so they’ll have nice memories of making madeleines,

Proust

Mountain-lionhood

To be a mountain lion

Amish,

Section on the Amish

Mommy, ducks, Newburyport, the fact that Mommy grew up in Newburyport, Mass.,

Mommy's history

the worst thing that could possibly happen, that you disappear off the face of the earth, the fact that the worst thing that can happen happens every time, eventually, to everybody,

the fact that I used to think married people who use “we” all the time were smug, but the truth is, after a while, if you live together, sleep together, eat and drive around together and have kids together, and discuss toilet paper preferences together, and clip your nails together, or at least listen to each other clipping your nails in the next room, well, you are a “we” and there’s no point in trying to deny it,

Stacy was born during a storm, but not on a table, and not in a playpool either, water wings, the fact that it was a really hot day and it got darker and darker in the hospital room and, just as the storm broke, Stace appeared, and I held her to me and said “Hello,”