Category: Essays

  • Ghosts That I Knew

    Ghosts That I Knew

    I recently found myself in an airport. I hadn’t been in one for over 7 months, which is a long stretch for me. I used to be able to mark my months by flights: to school, home for Thanksgiving, back for finals, home for Christmas, back for another semester, off to spring break, back again,…

  • Gettin’ Loud All Summer Long

    Gettin’ Loud All Summer Long

    Something about summer always makes me nostalgic. The heat, the smell, the sounds — summers always remind me of hot sticky days in Louisville or frollicking in summer rainstorms at camp, two and three-a-day field hockey practices and the post-practice pain that aches in that sort of wonderful kind of way. But most of all,…

  • A New Colossus: The Tenement Museum

    A New Colossus: The Tenement Museum

    The best thing about working in a museum is, of course, working around world-class art and important pieces of history. But the second best thing about working in a museum is that you get into other museums for free. An acknowledgment of our shared love of learning and our measly non-profit paychecks, this reciprocal admissions…

  • Deep Greens and Blues

    Deep Greens and Blues

    I’ll be honest: July has not been the kindest to me. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I’m moving, which in and of itself is a stressful ordeal. I‘m a nester, someone whose wanderlust runs counter to my extreme discomfort about any big life or location change. Add to that the serpentine torture of the…

  • Stranger In a Southern Land

    Stranger In a Southern Land

    We are super excited to introduce our very first Guest Writer to the blog! As two Louisville gals living in Bushwick, our perspectives have certain limitations, so we’ve been reaching out to some of you folks to get another spin on things. Interested in becoming part of the Z&S writer family? Email us at zeldaandscout@gmail.com!…

  • Letters to July

    Letters to July

    This post was inspired by YouTuber Emily Diana Ruth’s series, “Letters to July.” You can watch this year’s series, as well as 2013 and 2014, on her channel. Dear July, I heard lots of other people were writing to you, so I thought I’d give it a go. I’ve never been the most reliable pen…

  • Make It Work

    Make It Work

    If you’ve moved here from anywhere else, living in New York requires a lot of lifestyle concessions — more trips to the grocery since you can only take what you can carry on the subway, $15 G&T’s, schlepping laundry upwards of four blocks and up and down five stories in a quest to be clean…

  • When the Sun Goes Down in the South

    When the Sun Goes Down in the South

    It’s a sultry Kentucky night, one of those July evenings when everything is sticky with heat. Sundresses are plastered to slick thighs, and heels slip back and forth along the leather beds of sandals. Hands flap like desperate wings, trying to beat a little movement into the heavy air. And yet, despite the hundred degree…

  • So Here’s the Spiel

    So Here’s the Spiel

    There’s an episode in the first season of “Girls” when Hannah Horvath/Lena Dunham goes home to Michigan for a weekend. The ostensive purpose of the trip is to see her parents (if I recall correctly, an anniversary is involved), but our favorite would-be Voice of a Generation manages to squeeze in a date with her mother’s…

  • Left My Troubles All Behind Me

    Left My Troubles All Behind Me

    Zelda and I had an English teacher that liked to say that there were a limited number of stories in the world, and everything we read was just a variation on one of them. (I never heard the whole theory, but I remember being skeptical at the time. I’m still skeptical, actually.) The quest narrative…