Laurie Gould -- Midlife Mom Songs

Spring, 2019

All it takes for me to feel good is to walk in and put down my mat. 

I really like my new yoga studio.  It’s small, a single storefront room, with brick walls and limited HVAC (more precisely:  decent H, questionable V, and no AC whatsoever).   A mural fills the studio’s eastern wall.

This mural offers ample opportunities for contemplation, primarily on the topic of why this boddhisatva has no nipples.   Also whether the cobra-as-neck-wrap is really the right accessory choice, especially when…

Here’s the heist:  the perpetrator watches you (with eyes or camera) as you enter a code to unlock your iPhone.   He/she/they then steals your phone, uses your code to unlock it, and further deploys your code to lock you out of your Apple account (so you can’t wipe the phone remotely), capping off the caper by using the passwords you’ve stored on your phone to empty your bank accounts.   

I read about this emerging crime pattern in the Wall Street Journal, and was duly disconcerted: it’s the New York Times…

It’s dense where I live, in the middle of Boston.  We can get pretty much anything we need within a 10-minute walk.   The exception is fish:  good seafood is hard to come by in our neighborhood.  So we get a weekly fish delivery from a service called Evergreen, whose employees tool around the city on bicycle-drawn carts.  The urban density is key:  Evergreen has enough customers in a bike-friendly radius to make this a sensible business model. 

We are endlessly grateful for this service, because it is both…

A new song for the new year!   Special thanks to Steve Ansolabehere for camera work; words, music, instrumentals, video and whatnot by yours truly.

It is late afternoon on a weekend in mid-November and I am savoring the solitude.  It’s been a busy month, with back-to-back trips for work, family events, and fun, followed immediately by houseguests.  Delightful, all of it; but I am yearning for quiet, ready to be completely alone with myself and my thoughts. 

But I am not alone:  out of the corner of my eye, I see a shadow dash across the floor.   On second appearance it turns out to be a little brown mouse, zipping around my kitchen in search of warmth…

This will be short:  I have only a few minutes to write, while the lemons I’ve just blanched are still piping hot.     When they’ve cooled enough to handle, I’ll slice them, pack them in salt, and set them aside to ferment.  Preserved lemons are umami magic, adding depth and brightness to just about any savory dish.   But they’re hard to find, and pricey.  So I make my own. 

I’ve been baking my own bread for decades.   It’s a short hop from bread to pizza dough; and once you’re making your own dough…

I have been baking sourdough bread since the last millennium, long before it became the hip COVID lockdown hobby.  Over the past three decades I’ve gotten pretty good at it, if I may say so myself, my weekly loaves both tasty and attractive. 

Until recently, that is.   In the past year my breads have been somewhat uneven – edible, sure; but often flatter and denser than I’d like, not good-looking at all.   This skill I’ve honed for thirty years has become suddenly elusive.   Athletes have a word for this –…

Nothing at all to do with Labor Day, actually.   But my green screen does get a good workout:

In these last two years of dislocation and loss, I have practiced a lot of yoga.   Woven throughout have been two central themes of any meditative practice:  non-attachment and gratitude.   We are happier and better people when we can be appropriately thankful for what we have, and when we can let go of what we can’t.  Gardening provides ample opportunity to apply these lessons:  there are inevitably delightful surprises and pitiful failures.   You learn to celebrate the successes and shrug at the…

Here is how this past week was supposed to go:   

My husband was supposed to go on a long-planned deep-sea fishing trip, and I was supposed to go to a conference on the other side of the country.  Then he was going to leave a week early for our trip to Europe, so he could spend some time with colleagues in Barcelona.   I had big plans for the week on my own:   work, of course, but also recording, filming and maybe even editing my current music video project.   I would mulch my community garden plot, which…