Michelle Webster-Hein

My daughter worries about unlikely things. She fears that I will somehow spontaneously vanish, or that we could get lost and never find our way back home. She fears that, if her 5-year-old brother gets angry enough, he will run away and never come back. That the cats will escape, even though they demonstrate no…

The days are beginning to bleed together now, and I’m doing my best to build in some routine. “School,” such as it is, at nine on weekdays. Math, writing, movement, reading. Snack and storytime, preferably outside. Then creative hour with Dad. By the afternoon, I am out of ideas. I sit with my tea and…

In these recent, open afternoons, the kids and I have been hiking through the wetlands behind our house and into the forest beyond. They spend the better part of an hour clambering over the fallen trunks of trees while I sit on a stump with my binoculars, waiting for birds. Generally at some point someone…

The baby days do not dredge up nostalgia for me. I was too tired, too harried, too sad. I plowed through those years on an empty tank, burning fumes. I loved my babies fiercely of course, and I also loved those days in a manner of speaking, but I would not choose to live them…

The Sandhill Cranes are back. A dance of the birds is nesting in the wetlands a mile behind our house, trumpeting back and forth in their loud, brassy rattles. One or two cranes in flight will cry out, and the rest on the ground will answer in a deafening chorus. Sometimes two of them will…

Here in Michigan the virus has finally landed, and it’s as though we are all frozen on the decks of our tiny, respective ships, balanced at the beginning of a wave whose height and power we cannot know. Every single one of us has been swept suddenly into the same stunned circle; we are more…