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So now it has our complete attention, and we are made whole. We take it into our hands like a rope, grateful and tethered, freed from wanting for it to happen. It is here, precisely as we imagined. If the man has died, if the child’s illness has taken a sudden  turn, if the house has burned in the middle of night and in winter, there is at least a kind of stopping that will pass for peace. Now when we speak it is with a great seriousness, and when we touch it is with our own fingers, and when we listen it is with our big eyes that have looked at a thing and have not blinked. There is no longer any reason to distrust us. When it leaves it will leave like summer, and we will remember it as a break in something that had seemed as unrelenting as coming rain and we will be sorry to see it go. -Marie Howe

Hale County This Morning This Evening

Karen Russell, “A Brutally Honest Accounting of Writing, Money, and Motherhood”