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, [...]
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 [...]
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, [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]