Greetings, dear blog-readers! May 1, 2009, is the one-year anniversary of "nothing is wasted on the writer", and I thank you, thank you for your generous responses. I'm working on an anniversary post: it also happens to be the one-year anniversary of when I stopped using credit cards, as well as the general time of year I begin getting in… Read More
Here in Vermont, there is a moment of exquisiteness in the turning of each year. It only lasts for a few late summer days, days still warm and sun-filled, the outdoors still richly greened with only a few colored leaves, garden still producing. Yet in this charged moment, there's the slightest breath of fall. These days, close to earthly perfection,… Read More
I sometimes tell my writing students “Start out with a clear purpose, but be willing for that to change in the course of writing. ” Well, case in point. In this post, sparked by an e e cummings quote, I set out to explore the idea of how one becomes lovable… and wound up writing, mostly, about a dead cat…. Read More
If I want to eat anything else, I have 15 minutes in which to do it. No solid food after midnight. When I hurt my left shoulder about a decade ago, some now-forgotten person said to me, “Rotator cuff, probably. Rotator cuffs just wear out. You know what they call it in Chinese medicine? ‘Fifty year-old shoulder.’” My friend had… Read More
It is the best of times; it is the worst of times. It is October in Vermont. It is an election year (and what an election). It is the month of the year that was Ned’s last full month on earth. The best: the transition of the leaves from verdant to plush flame, fuchsia, gold, ochre, orange, salmon, a hundred… Read More
Okay, this isn’t the promised Part 3 of my meditations on being in Unity, New Hampshire, with Hillary and Barack back at the end of June, which, God knows, is by now a yuga in the timing of political dialog today… Lord, I may never write part three at this rate, just incorporate the ideas into something else. At any… Read More
Well-orchestrated? That’s the word with which I concluded Part One of this series: the word NPR used to sum up, in a manner I considered cursory and condescending, the June 27 Clinton/Obama rally in Unity, New Hampshire, which David, my partner, and I attended. My take on that event is continued here: up close, very personal. To see and hear… Read More
Late afternoon, Friday, June 27th, 2008. My partner and I were driving back to Vermont from Unity, New Hampshire. We were sunburned: we’d been outdoors from about ten to two, and neither of us had worn a hat or enough sunblock. We were damp: towards the end of that time, the skies had opened up, bursting very pregnant clouds into… Read More
I’m still going through business cards gathered at April’s International Association of Culinary Professionals conference, catching up with what I scribbled on the back of each, reminders of promises made (probably foolishly, but with the best of intentions). If you look at the May 1 post, you’ll see that April was a whole month of bebopping above and beyond IACP…which… Read More
Ohhhhh-krahoma! (Or, the color purple). On Thursday I found actual okra plants, starts, seedlings! (If this doesn’t seem like big news to you , please go back and read the post for May 27). So maybe I will get some honest-to-goodness non "curiosity" okra from my very own garden this year. I’m still going to plant my okra seeds, though,… Read More
It’s 10:57 P.M., Wednesday night. I’ve been expecting the phone to ring and it does: David. His plane has landed at BDL, the Hartford, Connecticut airport. He’s just pulling out of the rental car parking lot. In about two hours, he’ll be here. When David was here last weekend, at one point we were fixing something, or maybe doing summerization… Read More
