There once was a weekly web column named “Grack” (see below). This one’s from November 17, 2003, which I can hardly believe. You can find it among the other pathos-soaked lovelies in my Taos Soul ebook. – JHF Just before I saw the cloud, it happened again. There I was, just standing on the mesa, [...]
Maryland
Only Joyce and I are still alive
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, [...]
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 [...]
Contemporaneous photo from late 2003
A JHF classic! Originally published as “Pall of Flame” on 11/24/2003. Hard to read, even now that everyone is dead. The bitterness, the deprivation, oy. This was me, though, 16.5 years ago, when I lived here by myself. Can’t believe we haven’t moved yet. Where’s the intervention? It’s 19 degrees at noon here in el [...]
The sky was white with humidity and haze. From here it took an hour to get home.
Behold the crab skiff “Mollie,” gifted to me by a dear friend in Maryland sometime in the ’80s. The boat had belonged to her grandfather. A smooth circle worn into the planking showed where he’d always kept a basket for the crabs. I never painted it but did work some epoxy magic on bottom of [...]
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