The moment: Saturday afternoon, May 7, 2008, 2:11 pm. The place: a house on the top of a hill, not far from the small town of Saxtons River, Vermont. The view: a southeast facing window in which a vividly green meadow, exclamation-marked with a stand of tall silver-white birches, is framed first by woods, then…
Tag: compassion towards self and others
why every life should have a pugilistic 98-year old in it
Aunt Dot beats the odds again. Aunt Dot (Dorothy Arnof to the rest of the world except my brother, Stephen) is out of the hospital and back in her apartment on East 57th Street. (If this doesn’t sound like stop-the-presses news to you, please go back and read the posts for May 21 and May…
My boyfriend’s (almost) back…
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…
Playing Scrabble with the dead, feasting at the Brattleboro Farmers Market (with the very much alive)
The other day, Saturday, I’m driving down the unpaved road which leads from from my home at the top of the down to Westminster West Road. I’m with Traca Savadago, my "pan pal" and all-around buddy. She’s a friend in the meet and instantly feel you’ve known each other a long time category, though we’ve…
Relationshape-shifting: change, constancy, love, time, and “blace”
From Toni Morrison, in Inventing the Truth: the Art and Craft of Memoir: "When I hear someone say "truth is stranger than fiction," I think that old chestnut is truer than we know… it doesn’t say that truth is truer than fiction; just that it’s stranger, meaning that it’s odd. It may be excessive, it…
night drive with rain, arrows, gingerbread crumbs, too-big numbers, and, as always, questions
"… so perhaps the work is the arrow, flying from the writer towards what she will become…" This may not be the exact quote, but it’s more or less what I remember from May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude, which I read some thirty-five years ago. It was a book I found self-indulgent even then,…