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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
I feel small. And it makes me feel imbalanced. Once feeling large and poised over the summer months with the security of sunny days, familiarity of longer lit hours, and the comfort of happy places at beaches and bike-riding, has now morphed into a perspective that is confined and maybe a little off center. I didn’t realize this until after [...]