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 [...]
measuring time . . . takes time
July is here, already, and I can’t help but to think that we are halfway through this year. Where did the time go? When I was younger, my elders would tell me, “Just you wait. The older you get, the faster time goes.” Well, I must be there because I do see time moving quickly. Yet, sometimes it seems it doesn't move at all. I thought about these summer days. How the many daylight hours and warm weather invite participation in sports, how social gatherings bloom, barbeques fire up, and [...]
the memory keeper
Held discreetly between the palms of my hands, or grasped tightly in a clutch of one, I carry my identity in a compact bundle. Small laminated and paper rectangles slide inside into slots. Paper money, unfolded or halved, and a handful of change finds space elsewhere. We cling to our wallets, identifying who we are in a concentrated capsule—driver's license, medical insurance card, a credit card, a photo of a loved one, to name a few. If ever lost, we’re frantic. Who we are seems to have vanished, too. I [...]
the making of a vision statement
To prepare for speaking publicly about my forthcoming novel, The Wisdom of the Willow, I plugged into a webinar courtesy of a publicist. The speaker talked to an author audience about wisdom, and making heart connections with others when we go out into the world to talk about our books, our writing, our selves. She asked if we had a vision statement. A vision statement? “It’s what you believe in, furthering a movement, expressing yourself to the world,” she said. I just write. I responded to the computer screen. At [...]
what i know for sure
Looking at the white ceramic-tiled floor made me realize the oldness of things. The circa late 1990’s floor was showing her face with a pair of unmatched areas covering repairs in the ground of seventy-year-old leaking water pipes. The expiration date of the infrastructure of this old house had been stretched just too thin. Since then, I’ve been carrying an awareness of cracks and leaks and an unmatched patchwork when driving around town where a tired gas station was covered with plywood and rust, a ranch-style addition extended like [...]
how my ancestry makes me a better writer
I received an email from my half-sister who forwarded an email she received from a man neither of us knew. He had said that we were related in the Chadwick tree limbs of cousins and that he would add me as a guest on Ancestry so I could view his tree of which he had meticulously completed. This prompted me to think about my family tree that I had started, once, on Ancestry, but stopped with my investigation at my paternal grandparents because of the many first names of “Thomas,” [...]
when being alone and loneliness intersect
Walking near my home through Harms Woods, or standing in my backyard on a soft winter’s night searching for the moon between the house’s roofline and the big oak’s limbs, or perhaps sitting low in a stuffed chair in the library in a carved out space among tall bookshelves, or even typing this at my desk where I write, I have considered how I am my best when alone. Perhaps it has been the sunless days of January—and a thick ceiling of gray seemingly required to be cut with a [...]
Do you look, or do you observe?
They seemed to gather at once, sparrows and wrens, an occasional cardinal and woodpecker, swooping in to demand space and food. It became customary to watch the birds crowding on only four perches jutting from the tube-shaped feeder, as apparently, we’re on the same schedule for breakfast, lunch, and dinnertimes. I’d notice the flurry of activity, until one time it wasn’t just feathered creatures that filled my view out the kitchen window, but a red fox. His long bushy tail appeared larger than his lean gray-orange body, hunkered with large [...]