The Dear Ordinary

 I.

Hermione Lee's recent essay about Marilynne Robinson ("Sympathy for the Devil," New York Review of Books, vol. 67, no. 16) ends by quoting a scene from Robinson's recently published Jack. A confirmation class has just been let out, and the children scatter in "adolescent fashion, jumping from the top step to the sidewalk two or three times, laughing, bickering companionably, scuffling a little, expending energy that came with being released from expectation." Lee steps away from Robinson's passage: "In such moments, this remarkable, profound, and difficult writer lets us breathe the air of what in her masterpiece Housekeeping she calls 'the dear ordinary.'

II.

What is the dear ordinary here? The dogs are asleep for the morning. Two of the neighborhood kids - brothers, all elbows - walk their morning laps around the block. The squirrels gather walnuts and hide them in the piles of brush we leave at the curbs for fall cleanup.