When coming full circle
A rusty paper clip held them together. Typed letters, faded from the dark-inked punch of typewriter keys filled lines on discolored pages rimmed in muted brown. Stories told here were pulled from a brown envelope written over forty years ago by my then college self. The pages took me back in time to settings and places where words were heavy with observations, and innocence of a college freshman. Fingering the crinkly pages was like holding steppingstones into what is now my published writing life. They weren’t just youthful reflections caught [...]
A sense of place
Tucked in a corner of a shallow closet for two years now is a metal file box. I’ve always known it to be there, despite it being hidden by a stuffed bag of unwanted items for the Goodwill. Opening the closet door was like cuing a flashback when several rosaries, a wooden cross, a small statue of the Virgin Mary, and a burgundy wallet were put into the box upon my mother’s death, keeping them held tight like a tomb. I thought of the box, its contents, and how they [...]
change and transition – seeing it back then and now
On a crumbling, narrow road, twenty-three houses sit on either side of a gravel-ditched apron. My home is one of the few remaining cottages built on this private road in the 1940s for the wealthy folks to escape the city to the north suburbs. The road, its houses that line it, and its occupants inside those homes are not like what they once were. Outside, the sky is light platinum, and the earth, brown and dormant, and the street is wet made by the misting of falling light snow. The [...]
in the ending of a year: lessons and news!
While I fiddle with the outdoor holiday lights, my fingers stiff from a windy cold snap, I think, "Wasn't it just Halloween?" While busy hands unsort, I'm drawn to the dots of light. While I await them to pierce through the darkness, I can't help but to acknowledge what the lights suggest. Like a magnet, it attracts us to feelings of hope, aspirations and wishful thinking. My thoughts trail; I think of the past seasons. The simplicity in a winter morning's low sunrise, a blue heron plucking food from a [...]
What does connecting really mean?
When I’m headed out the door at daybreak, weather permitting, I tell my husband I’m leaving to be athletic. He understands this to mean I’m going out for exercise—a run, a brisk walk—along a path in the woods near my home. But sometimes my rendezvous with the natural world has nothing to do with the freedom to move my body through open space, and everything to do with connecting to it. It may seem cliché to say you’re going outside to “connect” with nature. It calls for an eyeroll and [...]
“list”
As I write this in late September, October looms in the rearview mirror. It becomes more visible as it nears. Both months are my best days of living where I am seated on a runway of the natural world, her change in dress from suits of greens into colorful party clothes of crimson , and burnt orange, and green-apple, yellow, dancing to the buzz of male cicadas calling. For me, October is all about the natural world's shift from one season to the next . . . until a couple [...]
something in the air
I didn’t need a calendar to tell me that August had ended, and September was here—already—when I took a routine brisk walk recently early one morning. A slight breeze carried just enough humidity to remind me it was still summer, with air that was cooler, driven from pockets in the woods, tapping my shoulders. I thought of what marked this past month: school buses, the disappearance of bike-riding kids, spent heads of bee balm and coneflower. And I couldn’t help but to feel that there was something in the air. [...]
on quitting
Watching the Nutcracker ballet for the first time from the fourth row of the amphitheater when I was a little girl opened my heart to wanting to be a ballerina. I was so close to the dancers that I could see the details in elegance, their lithe bodies floating with a grace and joy I envied as musical notes took them to places I could only hope to visit in my dreams. So, my mother enrolled me in ballet classes where I slid into pink tights and poured into a [...]