the beauty of an ordinary life
In the end, this is a kind of Mother’s Day story. But it starts this way: When he was 16-going-on-17 my friend David, the atheist, ornithologist, environmentalist, and retired Fedex pilot, hitch-hiked from his Hudson River home to the Gaspé, where he spent the first of many summers watching birds. It was 1956, year of…
Memphis, once known as the hardwood capital of the world, was built on a bluff, the Chickasaw Bluff, along the eastern side of the Mississippi River. The soil on the bluff, according to my limited understanding of it, is an interesting mix of loess (windblown silt), glacial gravel and alluvial deposits, good for filtering water…
The “sea of red” at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska holds just enough magic that one single visit, on a bright, clear game day, could sway even the most resistant football hold-out, namely me. The stadium, seats brimming with scarlet sweaters, is exponentially more impressive in person than on television. It is a spectacle that…
The letter, were I to write it, might open this way: What a year this has been, right from the start… In January we had the craziest weather. One weekend it snowed; the next it was sunny and 70 degrees. Almost every night ended with an outrageously vibrant, pink sunset. Inside the confines of our…
There is no excerpt because this is a protected post.
This may seem disjointed; that’s simply the way things are. My friend Harriet, the Harriet who is very much alive, is a quilter. She sews the most beautiful quilts (and other things, too) and has the best sewing adventures to tell, stories I would share except that they are hers and not mine. I mention…
The third thing she told me was that life begins at 50. She said this just to me, out of earshot from my traveling companion, as she was tucking me back into the driver’s seat, right before she said, “I love you,” which is what she always said at the end. We had been together…
Once upon a time, a long time ago, for a very short time, I lived in Jackson, Wyoming. I was a squatter, a gypsy, camped out in my little sister’s basement on a futon with a wooden wine crate for a bedside table, just like in college. Only I was 30 years old, still clinging…
