I live in a beautiful place, near the people I love most, but this space doesn’t feel quite like home. I was a little girl in the East, then grew up mostly in Colorado, and returned east — to New York, specifically — in my mid-twenties. I lived there for…

For seventeen and a half years, I had a clear identity. I was Professor Payne. But recently, that identity died. I killed it. There is a difference between loss of someone — a loved person or pet — and the loss of a cherished dream or desire, just as there…

The Lonely Cottonwood Model of Happiness Because I grew up where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains, there is a powerful image in my mind that has become a useful metaphor for me. Occasionally, on that western prairie, where the land begins to buckle and roll instead of lying…

I grew up in a family with a built-in schism. My mother, the older child of a former concert pianist and a professor of mathematics and astronomy, was raised in university towns, first New Haven, then Athens, Ohio. While not remotely wealthy, her family was comfortable. They were cultured, proud…

Meditations on “Home”: Woods and Meadowlarks My little-girl years, those formative ages between four and ten, were during the sixties: I was a tag-along baby boomer. During that time my family — my parents, my older sister, and I — lived in Pennsylvania. I remember moving there (in a few…