The First Line of a Poem Billy Collins Before it flutters into my mouth, I might spend days squinting into the wind like an old man trying to thread a needle by a window in the dying light of late afternoon. In a chair, he aims the limp end at the dim glint of the…
Let us so live in this trying time that when it is all over we can look one another in the eye with the knowledge that we have behaved honourably and fairly. ~David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars When I look at this photo I can feel, again, everything I was feeling in that moment.…
Think of these pages as graffiti maybe, and where I have scratched up in a public place my longings and loves, my grievances and indecencies, be reminded in private of your own. In that way, at least, we can hold a kind of converse. –Frederick Buechner I remember how excited I was when I got…
Except for our sky, these early spring days are mostly gray-brown, like weathered wood. The last patches of snow linger on blonde grass and shadowed flowerbeds. No green leaves yet, pink or white froths of blossoms overhead . . . or yellow daffodils popping up in front of the porch lattice. Seems we are at…
What killed people wasn't a bullet, a blade, a fist to the face. What killed people was a feeling. Left too long. Sometimes in the cold, frozen. Sometimes buried and fetid. And sometimes on the shores of a lake, isolated. Left to grow old, and odd. —Louise Penny, A Rule Against Murder (Chief Inspector Armand…
Photo Credit: Piper Jackson “Places, like people, are complex, and loving them isn’t simple.” –Kate Milford Photo Credit: Piper Jackson We were hoping for a miracle today with the arrival of the chimney expert. I was already dreaming of a fire burning softly in the old wood stove again, my warm office space upstairs. Of…
When the kids were young, he used to bring Valentines home for all of us. He would stop at Safeway on his way home, stand in the grocery aisle reading cards until he found the four he wanted, then choose a chocolate treat for each of us. It might be chocolate heart lollypops or small…
Hush, Hush, Somebody’s callin' my name. Hush, Hush, Somebody’s callin' my name. Oh, Hush, Hush, Somebody’s callin' my name. O my Lord, O my Lord, what shall I do? What shall I do? Sounds like Jesus. Somebody’s callin' my name. Sounds like Jesus. Somebody’s callin' my name. Oh, Sounds like Jesus. Somebody’s callin' my name.…
“There is often a good deal of the child left in people who have had to grow up too soon.” Willa Cather He’s napping this afternoon. It’s been three and a half weeks since the unexpected, seven-hour quadruple bypass surgery. I had stretched out beside him on the edge of the hospital bed that morning,…
It was a bright, pleasant, frosty morning, perfectly still, with an air like wine. –George MacDonald, What’s Mine’s Mine, 1886 Happy Birthday to my big sister Kathy! We’re reading this book together this winter, she in the Texas Hill Country, I in the mountains of Montana. Upon hearing that I had re-discovered the copy she’d…
Cabin Granny 