It’s a Big Bad World Outside
Every year for a while when I was a kid… Is probably the worst sentence I’ve written in a long time. How do you say something happened regularly for a limited time during a specific and short period of life? It happened all the time sometimes for a little while. Anyway! My mom would all the time sometimes for a little while go to Ocean City, Maryland with one of her friends. I suppose it was her “girl time,” time to be free of children and step away from being Mommy. My sister and I would ask to go each summer because we were annoying, and it was a part of…
The Forest That Once Was Green
For the past two weeks, afternoon temperatures here have bordered, if not surpassed, 100°F. It’s toasty. Literally. All the beautiful green grass, that not long ago I couldn’t wait to see chopped down, has been reduced to a sad, crunchy brown. There are some people in town that are putting up a valiant fight against the inevitable yard death; sprinklers can be heard whirring as the sun dips below the hills behind our house. Still, large patches of toasted lawn have started to spread like an earthy rash. Inside isn’t much better. We have one tiny air conditioner plunked into a kitchen window. It only has the power to cool…
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Do You Want to Live in a Pretty World
I know this isn’t the best picture. Sorry. It’s somewhere close to 145°F outside right now and I didn’t feel much like standing out in the sky oven to take a nice picture. Anyway, this is Phyllis. I don’t know why I named her, or call her “her.” Never mind me, I have a lot of quirks. She’s a poinsettia Brian surprised me with around Christmas last year. What are you supposed to do with a poinsettia after the holidays? If I have something that’s alive, I feel it’s my duty to keep it alive, no matter what. I once purchased a cactus from the hardware store and found a mysterious new…
You Keep Spinning on Your Compass Spoke
For most of my childhood we didn’t have a television. My mom would spend evenings reading poems and stories to my sister and I, as we sat, picking at the splintering wood, on our old front porch. She encouraged summer reading programs and the money she splurged on us was usually spent at Scholastic Book fairs. Later, when I hit my unfortunate rebellious phase and began skipping school, I would go to the library. I don’t think my mom even knows that. She undoubtedly thought I was hanging out with a Bad Crowd, smoking in alleyways, sketching my first tattoo. Nope. Library. Thanks to an early exposure to the beauty of poetry and…
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It Makes No Difference If the Sky Is Blue
I started this post yesterday, the one year anniversary of the evening we drove away from our home in Connecticut, but then life got in the way, as it sometimes does. Anyway, here we go. I was the one to suggest going homeless, “We have enough money to buy a cap for the truck. We could put everything in storage and just go.” I’ve always been one to “buck the tide,” as they say, but it was a wild idea, even for me. Brian didn’t hesitate before agreeing, but I don’t think he took the suggestion as entirely serious. However, over the next few days, as we started talking about our options more and…
