List of posts

  • UP HILL

    UP HILL

    Gary doesn’t want to walk up hill to the rose garden this morning, especially with bears. (Probably just one black bear, but three sightings so far in Forest Park… not anywhere near the area we walk.) Climate change seems to be foremost in the news everywhere in the world but in our country. Recent heat…

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  • HEARTS & CORDWOOD

    HEARTS & CORDWOOD

    Gary is filling the gap in his woodpile he so carefully straightened and vacuumed. He used to object if I called our cords of firewood “his” but no more. He has never allowed anyone to help him cut, clean, stack, or rearrange that pile. Photos follow.

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  • MOHS SCALE

    MOHS SCALE

    This post began, the idea of it, last month when I was supposed to be working on the novel. I left a stub and then folded the post away. I cannot believe it took me so long to actually look up the hardness of glass. It took Duck-Duck-Go all of two minutes to find everything…

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  • THE BOOK: stirred words

    When I was teaching high school English, I kept a Bible and the Qur’an on my shelves. I had the American stories collected by Erdoes and Ortiz. (Most of my books were free to borrow and generally came back, but that book and the side-by-side original Spanish and English translations of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda…

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  • IT MIGHT BE BULL… or not

    Even if you never took Art History, you might recognize this mural, a fresco in an ancient city on the Island of Crete. They put it on the cover of a recent translation of The Odyssey, which is a story about people living in a different part of the Mediterranean Sea and at least seven…

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  • ‘scared to death’

    ‘scared to death’

    Ralph Yarl is home from the hospital and recovering, “a miracle” considering he was shot in the head before the “terrified” gun-owner shot him a second time as he lay bleeding on his front porch. He’d come to the porch to pick up siblings but rang the bell on a Street instead of an Avenue—or…

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  • LIARS&ICE

    LIARS&ICE

    Word count, dental visits, complaints about the weather, lies, and the lying liars who tell them.

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  • GARY’S WOODPILE

    GARY’S WOODPILE

    I should have got a photo. I caught Gary vacuuming his woodpile.

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  • NEXT?

    NEXT?

    Gary and I are working on our future. Eventually the upkeep and isolation of the Arch Cape house will be too much. Our sons do not seem attached to the coast—oh, they say they miss it, but they seldom come out to visit. Once a year, or twice. They lead busy lives. That means we’ll…

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  • MIRTH & day 4

    MIRTH & day 4

    I woke too early this morning. That happens a lot these days. Sometimes I can get back to sleep. Sometimes I go to work. Lately I am knitting and revising my novel. Doesn’t that sound wonderful to myself: revising my novel!

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