It is the national Thanksgiving Day holiday today. It is 2015, and so I am alive and well on my fifty-fifth Thanksgiving Day. For most of my life, although I have been in a house of worship every week of the year, I have not been in a house of worship on this holiday. Thanksgiving…
I did. I did start in January. I did go to a beach front hotel in Seaside, Oregon, in January, and I did sit in a big roomful of writers and I did wonder why the room was so white (there isn’t a great variety of skin color in MFA programs, apparently), and I did…
A year and a half after I started taking myself seriously enough to begin researching programs (a stage that looks a lot like dreaming, fiddling around, and goofing off, but feels a lot like hunting for the perfect executioner to book for one’s own doom), I’m in. I’m in twice. I’m in, and I start…
At the edge, the rush comes in, goes out, comes in, goes out into the water. When you stand there, you think you understand all there is of in and out, in and out. You think you understand the flowing liquid foaming at your feet to tease your steps and call. Only when the tide…
This is the great mystery, I think. I have to work for there to be work upon which I can work and that is when the work begins. I am a blind sculptor. I don’t have to make the clay, but I do have to find and then form it with my inadequate hands. Blindly.…
Because my best intentions come to your awareness as more proof that you have been abandoned. Hurt again. And this time by me who we both know was born to love you. Because there is no action and there is no untried word or combination of the words or actions or gestures or signals or…
When he dies, the first widow in our high school class will be made. Soon, she says. It will happen soon. Is our heartbreak for her, I wonder? Is all of it for her? For them? Or is part of our pain found in our concentrated effort not to hear the first sounds of our fabric’s…
The Muse is definitely a She. I don’t think my life or my ecosystem would be worse off without houseflies. Conquering the labyrinth of medical offices makes me feel like a superhero. I’m glad I know how to diagram sentences. Protein at meals is like good quality clothing, and accessorizing it with various vegetables throughout…
wondering . . . You know the old saying, when the student is ready, the teacher appears? Well, what if that happens – is happening – all the time, and, ready or not, teachers come? And what if we ARE students, and we ARE learning, all the time, so that whenever we’re not aware of…
I know now why the stories of the sudden, brief, and achingly beautiful affair are true. I know this morning – all at once – why The Bridges of Madison County is a true story. When The Bridges of Madison County came out, my neighbor saw it in the theater, and she hated it. It was just…
deep in the woods where the trees live long enough to have an opinion you can see it they are torn every winter and the wind and the ice and the storms blow them to bits and pull them limb from limb they bleed they bleed and give up their wild vulnerability to forces unnamable…
They’re falling through the veil this week. I see them falling past me or maybe beyond. So far none too near. This is a beautiful and terrifying meteoric shower. So many fires fell from the sky this week. There is a family weeping for their brother. Another’s for their mother. A friend is getting ready with her…
And so I climbed. And I began to realize that every new exhilarating view came with a cost. Breathtaking means it takes your breath and altitudes can do that. It isn’t only beauty crashing into you. Light-headed means it makes you dizzy. So shield your eyes. Get used to the light up here. It’s okay…
The middle of the decade between being 50 years old and being 60 years old is proving to be a lot like gravity. Grave circumstances. The gravity of life. The too-much seriousness they charged me in my youth finds grave enough moments in my life that now no one says I’m overreacting. They made a…
I still see him there beside me. He was young enough – 11, maybe 12 – to think that my five additional years made me venerable. Amazing. The older sister who had all the power. We stood on the high bridge over the inlet to the ocean bay, and he said he wanted to spit.…
Some Small Aspect 