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…
glorious monotony
The daffodils have blossomed -- finally -- under the Chinaberry tree, hints that this winter, which last week coated each leaf, each limb, each pine needle in ice, will not have the last word. (Though, we may be sure, there will be another winter, when spring, and summer, and autumn have come round again.) G.…
Five Minute Friday: Encouragement
Some Fridays, when you need encouragement, you find that you aren't able to write it. So you wait until Saturday. Last night, I read in Genesis the story of Lot. A sordid tale in many of its parts -- the townsmen, the back-looking wife, the desperate-for-babies daughters -- yet a picture, all the same of…
Five Minute Friday (on Saturday): Mercy
We're celebrating a wedding this weekend. I've traveled, and others have traveled, and here we are. Last night my face ached with smiling; my eyes had been full of tears more than once. I've known the bride more than eight years, shared a room with her for three. We wrote a poem in the first…
Five Minute Friday: Again
Wanting to post, but not knowing what, I remembered Lisa-Jo and her Five Minute Fridays. So here I am joining. Again. Again. Stumped for words. Not a surprise, but a weariness. The "again" of disappointed hopes. The "again" of loneliness. The "again" of wondering what exactly I'm doing and why. The "again" of not really…
Five-Minute Friday: Wide
Five-Minute Friday again, with Lisa-Jo and the others. I'm glad to be here. Today's word is "wide," and I'm five years old singing that "There's a fountain flowing deep and wide," and I'm twenty-five years old singing that "There's a wideness in God's mercy," and today, maybe for the first time, I realize that the…
one wild
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? --Mary Oliver, "The Summer Day" And I laugh a bit. One life, yes. But not a wild one. A very quiet, coloring-inside-the-lines sort of life. (My brothers are recognized when they jump over chairs; no one would guess my…
Between Blue Rocks 