The Slow-Cooked Sentence

Fill me up

Rachael Conlin Levy
Threadless T-shirt design by Jeff Sapulettey.


Today I woke to an automated phone call from the school informing me of a two-hour delayed start because of the snow. So the kids and I celebrated with pumpkin pancakes (which I’m crazy about), and now I’ve corralled them all upstairs for the next 30 minutes so I can write.

I gotta write; it’s my passion. Just like my neighbor Pat’s got a thing for birds, and my toddler’s drawn to destruction, writing feeds my spirit. The act of stringing sentences into coherent paragraphs keeps me chugging all day long.

Some passions inspire us for months, such as my daughter’s desire to live life as a musical, singing her way through most conversations. (Which, incidentally, drives one of her brother’s into his own fit of passion.) Other love affairs burn through us in minutes, like the hour my bigger kids spent running from drain spout to drain spout, filling buckets and then pouring them out in a wheelbarrow. Their short-lived mania didn’t make a bit of sense to me, but it didn’t need to. Our passions don’t need explanation; either another person gets them, or they don’t. But they do need to seize us by the heart and send us careening through our world. Our loves need to leave us gasping for air, panting for more, more!

So every now and then I’ll share some of my passions with you. You’ll find them in the right-hand column under the tag line: What I’m loving. But now I’ve gotta run. Apparently, the pancakes are no longer taking the edge off hunger, and the kids are yelling (passionately) that my time is up.



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