We sit with our supper plates in front of the tv. Old folks with comfortable routines. Our evenings are chilly already, these recliners soft and warm. A blanket covers my legs, and a padded lap desk. My Daddy had salt and pepper shakers on the side table next to his chair when it was just…

I was getting an onion from the bin of the Hoosier cupboard out in the entry porch, the brown sugar and mustard, the big stainless bowl, to stir together the baked beans. It was going to be an easy supper . . . burgers and hot dogs on the grill, tons of leftover fresh veggies…

As I age in the world it will rise and spread, and be for this place horizon and orison, the voice of its winds. I have made myself a dream to dream of its rising, that has gentled my nights. Let me desire and wish well the life these trees may live when I no…

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…