a river's reflection of heaven and earth Many years ago, there was a small ranch-style brick house on a large lot the next block over. Once a golden honey color, it had turned to a brown mustardy yellow. The house has since been demolished, and a larger, modern two-story has taken most of the space in the large lot. [...]
An awakening started with a potted plant. It sat tall bedside in front of a window to capture what little light it could from an otherwise dim room. I wrote a while back on this blog about a much needed green thing during the winter. It popped from the mother plant, a small thing that pushed its head through the [...]
When I considered preparing for a book launch talk to be customary, as I had been talking about my debut novel, The Wisdom of the Willow, for some time now, it wasn’t. I had been preparing answers for questions when I realized I had been playing it safe with my writing. Over the past twenty years, I have [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]