Fifteen years ago I said, “no more dogs.” This was after our old sweet cocker had died and we were tired of dog care. No more, I said. No more cleaning up the poop, no more rushing home to let her out or taking her to the vet or having to find care for her … Read more
Magic. It was what my mother lived for. We’d go to a magical place, a party, a carnival, a world apart where clowns appeared and juggled balls, where ballerinas danced on horses under the fantasy lights in the middle of the ring, and the music tinkled and waved like the ocean, organic and beautiful, beneath … Read more
One of my great joys in summer: hanging clothes on the line. It reminds me of childhood and playing in the back yard on a perfect summer morning while my mother picked each shirt or towel or pillowcase out of the wicker basket and hung them one by one on the line. This was way … Read more
Monday, August 3, 2015 I just learned from an old classmate that my high school English teacher dubbed me Mona Lisa. I have absolutely no memory of this – although I do remember that she dubbed this same classmate the milkmaid! (not to blow your cover here, classmate.) Miss Hickman was tall, skinny and stooped, she had leathery … Read more
Monday, July 27, 2015 Last night we watched Words and Pictures, a magnificent movie, and it posed the question, Which is more powerful? Words or pictures? Words, as embodied in the English teacher, or pictures, represented by the art teacher? Of course, the answer is that they are both powerful, and that art, whether written … Read more
Monday, July 20, 2015 Welcome to my new blog. I was going to name the whole blog Creative Spirit until I realized how many sites, books, programs, etc. there are with that name. I guess I’m not the only one who thought of that phrase! But of course, the creative spirit is something universal, something … Read more
On a road trip from western Vermont to the coast of Maine, Jess and I stopped at Joe’s Pond for a picnic lunch. We love Route 2, a local road meandering through sweet little Vermont towns and skirting the White Mountains in New Hampshire, then into Maine with its scruffy tourist spots and mill towns.
Who would think that living in Vermont could involve taking the train to work? I certainly didn’t. Living in Vermont involves green mountains, pristine river valleys, unspoiled vistas, hiking, canoeing, watching the wildlife, but not commuting on a train. Living in Vermont means that wherever we go, there is space and quiet. But wherever we … Read more
The other night, as my choir was practicing the ancient hymn, Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence, I thought about the current craze for vampires. Vampire books, vampire movies, etc. Which is really about our human need to grapple with the mysteries of life and death. We long to see and even to enter those … Read more
