MUSINGS ON LIFE AND WRITING WITH SARAH BUCKLEITNER
Two months ago, my Grandma Izzy died. She was 97 years old, so it shouldn't necessarily have come as a surprise to me. But it did. It swept me right off my feet. We saw her the weekend prior, and she'd quizzed Jordan about all of the wild animals he'd gotten to see lately at … Continue reading On a Wonderful Woman
Back when I worked in the animal shelter, I encountered a new concept: sometimes, when someone who frequently fostered animals in their home reached out to see if they could foster another, we'd talk about their "Capacity for Care." Meaning--did that person have the time, space and energy to properly care for an additional responsibility? … Continue reading On Capacity for Care
Warning: this post contains spoilers to Little Birds and Other Small Magic. Read at your own discrection. One of the most common questions I get about Little Birds and Other Small Magic is how much of the story and characters are based on events and people in real life. The answer: a lot. I stole … Continue reading On Stealing from the Real World in Writing Fiction
To start, a disclaimer: I am not currently pregnant. I'm writing this post for a dear friend, who asked me to show her the lovely parts of pregnancy and childbirth, instead of just the hard parts, as they prepare to grow their family. I also want to be clear that pregnancy is 9 months of … Continue reading On the Poignance of Pregnancy
Jordan and I are ten years into our relationship, and in those ten years, we've lived in four different states and six different towns. Each place we've lived has had a unique culture, one that slowly revealed itself to us over the passing days and interactions. There was Burnsville, Minnesota, with its teeming highways and … Continue reading On Family Culture
Today I was unloading the dishwasher, sorting forks and spoons into their rightful places in the silverware tray, not really thinking about anything in particular--maybe about how unloading the dishwasher is such a boring, adult activity--when something about a mug I was holding made me think of my mom. I don't know if it was … Continue reading On Grief and Coffee Mugs
Note from future-Sarah: This post was written before our move from Georgia to New Jersey, in 2022. Since then we've moved again (though hopefully for the last time), and again grappled with the roots we severed and the places we'll miss. I decided to finally publish it because it still rings true, and I thought … Continue reading On Creativity in Times of Turmoil
Today, on a walk around the block, I ran into the mom of one of my childhood friends. We had the whole gang with us: Linden putzing along in his red and yellow car, Hollis gnawing the strap of his carrier on my back, and Jordan, hand-in-hand with my mom. The gang We chatted for … Continue reading On Collective Grief
Back in January of 2020, I wrote a post about some of our goals related to living an environmentally conscious, slow--but also attainable--life (read the post here). Since then, I've watched the world get slammed by a global pandemic, we lost our childcare, we at times had upwards of 8 people living in our small … Continue reading Living in accord with the land: how we’re doing
It's hard to believe how quickly the last few months have gone. I feel like I blinked, and suddenly I'm thirty and Hollis is two months old and Linden is three and Jordan is thirty-four (we accidentally clustered all our birthdays within a two month span). We soared through some of the highest highs of … Continue reading October, November & December
Feathery Thoughts 