-
Most days I find glass during my walk on the beach, but I always find agates. Rarely I will pick up a feather. I lean down slowly, sliding my hand down my thigh, and even so my head throbs when I pluck a treasure from the sand. Ten days ago I suffered a concussion in…
-
I have a brief creative nonfiction essay in issue 59 of Dinty Moore’s Brevity. All the work there is nonfiction and very short (under 750 words). My true story, “A Murder of Crows,” recounts an event from some years ago at a local summer camp. This journal’s website has been a valuable resource for my…
-
I fell hard yesterday. I was doing something stupid, trotting backwards as I tried to photograph my husband and a seastack and he kept walking right out of my frame. (If he knows he’s being photographed, he mugs or frowns. Photos of Gary smiling are pretty rare.) So I was backing up to keep Gary…
-
Linking to an article about “lawnmower parents” triggered an interesting discussion on my Facebook page. Some were defensive about “rescuing” or failing to “rescue” children. Others pointed out that some children genuinely need more guidance than others due to disabilities and disadvantages that may not even be visible. As a private and public school teacher,…
-
Last year a student argued that black people were not being unfairly targeted by police because unarmed white people had been killed by police too. Entirely absent from the student’s research was some simple math which would have revealed, that yes, it’s true Whites as well as Blacks are killed, but black people are disproportionately…
-
It is the last of August, and this ending could not come too soon. It’s been a memorable month. There are great things about August: my wedding anniversary, the birthday of my older son, and surely something else. In the old days, August is the month I began playing solitaire compulsively—with cards, not on the…
-
I began using fancy pens when I was in college as an Art major. Mostly I wrote with a 0000 stylus fountain pen—a Kon-i-noor Rapidograph. The tip of such pens is a tiny tube, thinner than a crow quill, and notorious for clogging. The 4×0 tip makes a line 0.18mm wide. I used a 3×0…
-
My step-grandmother’s secretary desk has pride of place in our home opposite the front door. Yesterday, I began emptying this beautiful secretary, purchased in 1962 for $125. Baubles, birthday cards, baskets, and relics of childhood. Things my mother and grandmother kept, programs from Ian’s early performances, and things I had forgotten completely even existed. A…
-
We were very young when we met and still young when we married. Lucky in that joining, as in so many things. Lucky my step-grandmother was a weaver. Lucky her second husband loved Gary. Lucky to walk off the street in Cannon Beach and get a job in a bakery. Lucky our sons were born…
-
One day my favorite design teacher, Hazel Koenig, saw me walking to a metals class in the Art Building. She stopped me to ask if I would be willing to help out at a state art education conference. That would have been about 1974. Later, she got me my first teaching job. I thought of…
-
Subscribe
Subscribed
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
IMPERFECT PATIENCE 