1. Putting on mascara before going out to a therapy session is like curling my hair before taking shower. 2. Hanging up from talking on the phone to my husband, I said, “I’ve got to get back to doing whatever it was I wasn’t getting done.” 3. He’s a counselor who specializes in substance abuse. [...]
1. Red ink batik 2. The empty nest 3. The uninhabited planet 4. The great beyond 5. I flunked vegetarianism Post note: All the above photos were taken in my back yard or in my Blue Ridge Parkway neighborhood.
Every town needs a poet or two, just as it needs an auto mechanic, a grocery shop owner, and an “in house” band. Every town is a microcosm of the whole world. If we stay where we are and invest in our own community, the whole world eventually comes to us. ~ Colleen from Homegrown, [...]
A good book. A lounge chair. The sun makes freckles on my bared skin. A single fat fly buzzes by like a fighter pilot that doesn’t know the war is over. This one doesn’t know it isn’t summer. A clumsy yellow hornet goes down, crashes into my arm. I flick it off while sipping every [...]
Once I get up to dance, I don’t sit down again until the band leaves the stage. The waitress, thinking my unfinished mug of Sam Adams was abandoned, swiped it off the table before I could stop her. I made do. In between songs, I sipped what was left in the bottle, until a second [...]
This is my favorite photograph taken yesterday at a neighboring farm community where Joe and I spent Thanksgiving. I call it “Reunion,” and it was taken from the balcony where the best rocking chair in the house is and before diving into our lucky pot luck feast. I promise that, although I do have to [...]
1. Note to self: Don’t try washing the grey out of your bangs in the bathroom next to white curtains. 2. You’ve heard of a “bad hair day”? Sometimes I have a bad brain day when nothing gets started and nothing gets going. 3. Last week I got my hair cut and my teeth cleaned. [...]
Mara and I go to the Scrabble board the way others go to a bar. Scrabble takes our minds of our problems, but it also gives us the opportunity to talk about them. With letters clinking in the bag, we pour out our feelings as we play. “I’ll tell you a joke,” she said, seeing [...]
Somewhere over the weekend I lost my sense of humor. I wasn’t expecting to lose it and was caught off guard when I did. I had it on Saturday night while wearing Kyla’s ruby red slippers. I was feeling pretty good Sunday morning when Joe and I went for a walk. Sometimes it seems that [...]
Spoken Word Open Mic at the Café Del Sol ~ Nine year old Kyla, dressed like a rock star and wearing ruby red slippers, was our MC for the night. Leigh plunked a tune on her bright red guitar. Lora sat in the midst of her own passionate pastels that hung from the café walls. [...]
The following essay is the one that recently aired on our local PBS station, WVTF, and it appears in its entirety here. You can listen to me reading it at the WVTF website. When I first started blogging in March of 2005 many people asked, what’s a blog? Less people ask me that same question [...]
My husband is a counselor, a soccer coach, a hunter. He practices martial arts and yoga and has just completed a last class for his Master’s Degree. Sometimes during the week, we hardly really see each other. We’re both independent and involved in our pursuits and passions (in my case, sometimes obsessively), which is why [...]
1. Right now I’m unemployed with two full-time jobs, writing and therapy. 2. When I first became a stay at home mother, I remember saying that I had never worked so hard in my life. I’m learning that retirement is similar and that there’s hardly ever any downtime when there’s no separation between my life [...]
1. The leaf within 2.The youngest among us 3. Impressionable 4. Food for thought 5. As far as the eye can see Update: My WVTF radio essay “Born to Blog” will air on Public Radio this Friday at 6:55 and 8:55. I’ll post the text here over the weekend, but you can hear it now [...]
Last week when I posted a poem called “Hot Flash at Night,” I forgot to mention that it was composed while I was asleep. I frequently “write” in my sleep, but that was only the second time I was able to preserve an intact poem into the morning. (Here is another one). The poem posted [...]
When I say “work” I only mean writing. Everything else is odd jobs. -Margaret Laurence I don’t remember who was holding the camcorder at the time, but the question posed was, “what do you want to be when you grow up?” My brother Jim had just answered. “A photographer,” he said. He was nearing fifty-years-old [...]
The first time I met isa maria was in the late 1980’s at a neighborhood pond where weekly swimming lessons for Floyd homeschoolers and Blue Mountain School students took place. isa stood out, not only because of her striking beauty, but because she was the mother of two babies and was carrying one on each [...]
“Why didn’t you tell us that Josh was being interviewed for US Airways Magazine?” my sister-in-law’s message on our answering machine said. Her husband was flying from Missouri to the east coast when he picked up the magazine in the seat pocket in front of him, I learned when I called her back. Flipping through [...]
