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I submitted my “Butterfly Fontanelle” novella to a literary press a couple of days ago. It has remained untouched since January. I had hopes for it when I began four years ago, but then lost faith. Today I reread the beginning of a letter responding to that novella. One of my favorite writers wrote: “I…
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Pandemic by Lynn Ungar What if you thought of it as the Jews consider the Sabbath — the most sacred of times? Cease from travel. Cease from buying and selling. Give up, just for now, on trying to make the world different than it is. Sing. Pray. Touch only those to whom you commit your…
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I’m not sure what I meant to write today. There have been several ideas, none of which made it to this page before becoming sidetracked. We have been exploring, balancing our checkbook, and spending almost half the week in Portland. Sunrises. Pedicures (not mine). Travel (not me either).
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This is not a sad story, so bear with me. No one dies in this story. A car is injured, but we’re over that. My husband has an unfortunate relationship, or anyway some unfortunate experiences with wild animals. He worked at Woodland Park Zoo and got on well with the wolf and the birds, but…
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The package contained only the book and the note. It’s true that my classroom Bible had vanished, a New International Version, but that would have been at least six years ago before I retired from teaching full time and had to clear my classroom book shelves. I usually kept a Qur’an on my shelves too.…
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“I’m not being facetious or anything, but I think I’ve never said this before: for a dyed-in-the-wool feminist, you know a lot about traditional ‘women’s work’.” Gary had just asked me how a damask tablecloth should be washed and so I told him. (The key is pressing it after washing with a very hot iron…
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RATTLE is a poetry journal that emails poetry each morning, including a weekly response to a current event. Today, I received a form poem that made me sit up and feel. What follows is the mother’s explanation of where her words were birthed and a link to the poem.
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I assumed that a year was precisely 52 weeks, but had never done the math. That is odd for a lot of reasons, mostly because I was always good at arithmetic and algebra and geometry etc. I worked figures in my head back when I was running regularly in my 40s and 50s. Anyway, I…
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Responsibility or do I mean guilt? How I suffer for my mistakes. Regret. The I-shoulds or merely owning-up? I second guess myself a lot. I question my own motives and spend more time doubting myself than feeling confident I have done the right thing. I mean to be fair. I hope to be kind. Always.…
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It’s been many years since I took a class from Ursula K. Le Guin and in one of them she talked about the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral. She was incensed at how little work of hers was available in English. After all, Mistral was a Nobel laureate, and her work was important. Le Guin had…
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IMPERFECT PATIENCE 