Clik here to view.
Ocie
A city-dweller lives in a bungalow with electric blue shutters and door. Her name is Ocie. Faded shirt and cut-off trousers flap on her withered body. Snow-hills of cropped hair bespeak innocence....
View ArticleClik here to view.
Hot dogs and Hamburgers
“Accidents happen on purpose,” says Rob Schindler, the author of Hot Dogs and Hamburgers, a quirky title for this nonfiction romp, for that’s what it is. A chance bullying of his eleven-year son during...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Stuff
A two-foot blonde doll with searching blue eyes, a blue Gymnic ball, baby’s first book, a hoopskirt with a purple butterfly, a scuffed CD player, coloring books, a Pink Princess mirror, used stuffed...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tulips
Beneath wintry graves soils engage spidery root-bulbs. Hesitant blades pierce the mulch. March rains dampen tentative greens like children forgetting their lines. Weeks pass. Spiked blades pattern...
View ArticleClik here to view.
The Shell Collector – Stories
Who doesn’t love a story, especially a short one that rankles our humanness and leaves us wiser? Such is found within the pages of The Shell Collector – Stories (2002) crafted by word-artist Anthony...
View ArticleClik here to view.
An Intriguing Woman
Recently, I encountered a botanist with a chaste spirit. Tall, ginger of hair, broad-boned, and brimming with energy, she researched mosses for over thirty years on her father’s woodland estate in...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tending
In mid-May I breathed prayer into each marigold before securing its tangled hairs into the loose dirt mixed with potting soil in the raised beds spanning the front of my bungalow. Once watered and...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Growing
One of my Christmas gifts was a pear-shaped bulb of an amaryllis, boxed with a compressed planting disc and its pot. The directions were simple: Add two cups of warm water to the disk resting on the...
View ArticleClik here to view.
January’s Bluster
January’s bluster mandates thermal underwear, bulky sweaters and scarves, fur-lined boots, and so much more. Shopping, working, even walking in the chill, fill our days, all made bearable between...
View ArticleClik here to view.
A Necessary Violence
March’s fickle warmth swells the buds gracing the branches of the decades-old lilac bush, thriving outside my study window. For weeks, I observe this necessary violence, splitting apart the wombs of...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tulips
Soils engage spidery bulbs beneath wintry graves. Hesitant blades pierce the mulch. March rains dampen tentative greens like children forgetting their lines. Weeks pass. Spiked blades pattern gardens...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Gardens
What will it be this year: rows of marigolds, geraniums, wave petunias? Or perhaps dwarf zinnias or impatiens or cornflowers? My tools are ready. My hands itch to prepare the soil and begin planting...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Gift
For eight Februarys, a single gold crocus has pushed through the mulch in my flowerbed, preening its petals within the morning sun. Its blooming, in the same place, seems to proclaim, “I’m back! Take...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Training Wheels
“I can’t!” says a towheaded three-year-old, leaning upon the handlebars of her blue bike and looking up at her mother. Her sneakers grip the asphalt path in the park, alive with birdsong. Ahead,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Tulips
Loose soils engorge spidery bulbs beneath wintry graves. Hesitant greens wiggle and meander among mulched beds. March rains drench tentative shoots like children forgetting their lines. Weeks pass....
View ArticleClik here to view.
both wings flappin’, still not flyin’, by Jane Ellen Ibur
So exclaimed Mary R Woodard (no period after the letter R), her body broken by decades of washing, ironing, and cleaning for others in St. Louis, Missouri. As a child she hunkered down in a ditch in...
View ArticleGift
From my backyard came the dull whir of a machine. It was the crew from Droege Tree Care sculpting a hole in the ground to accommodate the root system for the ‘Edith Bogue’ southern magnolia tree I had...
View ArticleSurprise
March’s ire prolonged a soggy grayness that flummoxed root systems timed to fire their greenness above ground. Wetness loosened gumballs from specter branches and hurtled them like grenades toward...
View ArticleSplitting
It was happening again—outside my study window. Like hard hats, nubs tipped the branches of my old lilac bush, caught up in the play of trickster winds. Over the winter months, the nubs appeared...
View ArticleDoors
Every day we open and close doors to our homes, our cars, places of work, institutions, family, and friends. Do we notice the variety of the doors: hinged, folding, sliding, rotating up and over, some...
View Article
