Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as people migrated from the east, they found a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us…
Five Minute Friday: expect
We've been "expecting" for six months now, a euphemism which I find doesn't quite catch the truth of it. Early in the pregnancy, if I'm honest, my expectations were different -- my husband and I both acknowledge, now, that we didn't expect to make it this far; we expected -- for a myriad of reasons…
Five Minute Friday: easy
All night long it was the sound of the rain from the eaves, and still this morning it falls, steady and deliberate, on the million leaves that have supplanted the pollen of two weeks ago, on the birds feeding out back, onto puddles where it bubbles and disappears. And this is easy, to sit and…
love: small and glad, day 7
This sixth-floor waiting room has wide windows, overlooking the city, which from up here has more trees than buildings, by far. In the far distance, a buzzard wheels and rides an updraft, and in the foreground, there’s a butterfly riding another updraft, up at what seems to me a dizzy distance for a butterfly, that…
possible: small and glad, day 6
“I dwell in Possibility -- / A fairer House than Prose,” quoth Emily Dickinson. I always stop and look at that juxtaposition: possibility vs. prose. Not poetry vs. prose, nor yet again possibility vs. certainty — negative or positive certainty. I suspect Dickinson wanted me to look at it. To think that somehow she means…
Five Minute Friday: celebrate
An apt word, this weekend, as it's a celebrating weekend: a wedding shower tomorrow, my first official event as bride-to-be. There are all kinds of good reasons to celebrate weddings, but there are a few things we keep in view in the midst of the celebration: Marriage isn't eternal: it's lifelong, Lord willing, but it's…
Five Minute Friday (on Saturday): here
Here we have no lasting city. It's easy to see it in some ways: the paint that chips and crumbles around the window frames, the deep grooves in the wooden floors, the bricks of the street outside the window wavy from the duress of freeze-and-thaw, freeze-and-thaw. We seek the city that is to come. The…
further up
In the yard, the daffodils are blooming, and in the basket on top of the refrigerator, an onion reached up its own slender greenery. I marvel at this universal urge to grow: how bulbs and seeds and roots gather and force themselves upward, compelled to fruitfulness by a command dating from the fifth day of history,…
Noticing, Day 31 (and Five Minute Friday): Leave
Leave. It comes with connotations of goodbyes, yet it need not. This verb can also mean "to put forth leaves." On the sidewalks I notice that Bartlett Pear leaves begin to pile in thick crimson piles, and on the crepe myrtle branches leaves are at once less frequent and more colorful. Gerard Manley Hopkins describes…
Noticing, Day 27: goodness. mercy.
Today it's hay bales standing in calm ranks on their new-mown fields. It's dogs frolicking in pairs in the ditches of the highways: a pair of tiny terriers, a pair of hounds, and -- most improbably -- a pair of Shih Tzus. The weather, apparently, brings out the joyous dogginess of all dogs. It's the breeze…
Between Blue Rocks 