Every year about this time my wife gets weepy over “family,” those distant ones in Iowa (now Minnesota), Georgia, or wherever. Location doesn’t matter except that we aren’t there and weren’t expected anyway, distance being what it is. She remembers Thanksgivings in Ottumwa, Des Moines, or Muscatine with piles of food, the special china, journeys, [...]
Mystery
The baby powder may be ancient.
My wife was admiring the moonlight shining through the clouds. A half moon, she said. I could have told her. For whatever reasons, my emotional energy crashes on a half moon. Usually I want to light myself on fire and jump into the gorge. Fortunately this involves getting out of my chair and I have [...]
Great big truck o’ gas beside the Ranchos church one lovely afternoon
There must be all kinds of ways to do this. Fortunately the unconscious never quits. This time I was walking with my wife through the hall of a large building like a college dorm except with wider corridors and clean white walls. There was some kind of event and we were staying there. The hall [...]
May 12 this year looking out across the Talpa valley
The last time I saw David Ashworth, he’d come up to Chestertown (MD) from Texas unannounced to drop in on old friends. I hadn’t seen him since he divorced Joanie, shut down his pottery studio, and returned to the land of his birth at least ten years before. This time he’d fallen in love for [...]
45°F and felt quite warm
It’s all a process. You never reach the “end,” though we all try. One evolves toward ever-greater happiness through self-awareness. That explains the lift I felt when we turned down the foreclosure in the sagebrush. It wasn’t the landscape, though, but rather the restrictions. Turns out there was a subdivision. Our realtor sent us the [...]
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