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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
Vestiges of fall lay on the ground in bits of dried leaves, acorns, weakened limbs, and memories of a landscape once in vibrancy and motion. A blanket of frost covers it, encased like a tomb to be nudged by a dawning sky and the promise of sun. I was out for a hike in the early morning when I saw [...]
It’s the season of trees when their leaves, a pallet in shades of green from bright leafy flora to deep woodland, cease their infusion of growth and bleed vibrancy of color seen only in the fall. It’s a time to connect and to explore the wonder of a landscape falling softly to sleep, but not before it brings drama to [...]