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I see myself in the interactions from my family and recognize that same fear and dysfunction that have marked so much of my behavior. It is good, healthy, for me to stop jumping each time they push the buttons, and it is encouraging to see clearly the destructive behaviors I learned in that collective. BUTContinue reading “Stasis”

I am beguiled and attracted by the remote, the unfamiliar, the different. I yearn for the places I have not been, not as a fickle tourist or outsider but as someone who inhabits them, not as a dilettante sampling or an occupier oppressing, but as a seeker of the sources of my being, of pathsContinue reading “My Orientalism”

The place was rustic and comfortable, if buggy. An electric paddle fan stirred the air from the apex of the sloped octagonal ceiling. A large stone fireplace opposite the old maple bed with its cotton comforter printed with meadowlarks and orioles and mocking birds. Decades-old knotty pine paneling. Well-worn armchairs and scuffed tables of hand-me-downsContinue reading “Residency”

I remember the house in Mendham where one summer day it poured on one side and did not rain on the other, and my brother Peter picked the crabapples off the tree in the front yard on the rainy side and threw them at me, and they were hard as rocks and they hurt. IContinue reading “Seeing Red”

I fear I’m a dabbler. I look around at all the PhDs I know who all settled long ago into their field, and focus, and research stream. They keep turning that same plot in that same field, digging it deeper and deeper, breaking up clods and clay, adding nutrients and soil amendments, organic matter andContinue reading “Leaden”

Lilies shading from white to deep burnt orange adorn the feet of the cherry trees, whose leaf litter and falling fruit demand daily attention. The cherries hang in dark fistfuls along the lengths of branches weighted to the ground. A lone squirrel stares silently from his perch then grabs a cherry and eats it likeContinue reading “Illicit Pleasures”

The only connection among the dozen or so of us, the only sinew that ties us in any obvious way, has nothing to do with writing, the purpose for this gathering. It is critters that connect us. Each and every one of us has at least one varmint visitor in the quarters set aside forContinue reading “Residents”

My destination is a twenty-minute walk when you walk briskly, and the trip navigates some unsavory and unattractive areas. So one does walk briskly, which makes it difficult to note carefully the landmarks that will be needed to assure return home, especially when walking at the same brisk pace. I have been told, repeatedly andContinue reading “Ecuador”

Daylight savings time has me sleeping odd hours in these transitions days when we have returned to early dark, with street lights ablaze by 7 p.m. What an odd, disorienting, unnatural feeling to awaken at 7:30 a.m. , to have slept through those lovely, near-still, silent productive hours of the morning before the animals beginContinue reading “Down-fluff Bundles”

I tried my hand at drawing and then watercolor yesterday in an attempt to capture the sparse beauty of these woods. The thin, almost fragile, trees stand far apart without a lot of scrub or underbrush. The floor as far as the eye can see is carpeted in small twigs, rotting leaves, and a smatteringContinue reading “A Whole Lotta Water”