Categorically Speaking
Dubbed One name for a collection of can’ts, of never wills and less-thans, a singular bucket into which they dump the myriad ways she comes up short. Autism. The rusty scuttle whose name expands to encompass the collected others— Obsessive Compulsive Disorder Severe anxiety disorder. Chronic polyuria. Lordosis, Kyphosis. Intellectual Disability. Oh, I’ve made peace […]
Little Altars Everywhere
My home is host to little altars everywhere honoring lives lived, seasons arriving and leaving, the hundred sparks of grace and wonder, sorrow and understanding that pock and foliate hours and years squeezed into the dance of this body, my particular, grand, unbearably blessed and gratefully transient human experience. On good days I go bowing […]
Me and My Shadow Go to Market
It is May 2020, still early in The Covid Times. We take ourselves to the market, by which I mean our whole selves, me in my layers of self-consciousness— the run of the mill kind that most of us don without thought— she baring all, as usual: no pretense, nothing to hide. The market rule […]
LATELY
The ground seems foreign, new roots and stones anchored in the middle of familiar paths, and my feet stumble more, much more. Are you stumbling too? Such heavy air, a downward press on the shoulders makes it hard to look up, check out the sky. I can’t speak for you, but I feel your heart […]
Medicament
Medicament This morning’s waking, tight and tender to the touch, felt like neck ache, and all along the spine of this day my heart climbed and slid, ridge-riding the grief and uncertainty of these past months, pushing up towards bone-like pinnacles, vertebraic protrusions of more bad news— illness and violence, economic cancer, people hating their […]
Gifts and Visitations
It’s been just over a month since my dear friend and soul sister Marina died, after a quick and nasty tussle with appendiceal cancer. She visits my consciousness daily, in ways both fleeting and substantial. We talked a lot about the afterlife in her last months. She told me clearly that, when she visits me […]
Dragonflies
As I write this, my dear friend Marina lies dying in a lovely room inside the oldest house in an historic and pretty New Hampshire town. A wonderful woman who worked with her in the local general store has taken her into her home. Hospice has set her up well with a hospital bed that […]
Little Big Thing
“Stay in awe of life. The little things are the big things. “ ― Richie Norton “I’m cold.” Bink had just gotten up, a good hour later than she used to get up on any given pre-Covid Monday. My eyes scanned her body, noting the hybrid pajamas I’d hastily grabbed for her to put on […]
Collateral Sorrow
It’s been a time of times, a steady landslide of uncertainties. Yes, the Covid, the shutdown. Yes, Bink and so many other adults with disabilities being home all day every day for many weeks, with all the usual programs and activities canceled. Yes, the mass suffering and loss that has accompanied this pandemic around the […]
When all this is over…
WHEN THIS IS OVER Bring bread, chewy and warm, wrapped in that red checkered tablecloth that always sings picnic, which is short for happy family, easy friendships, peace and plenty in our town state country planet. We never went on one, a picnic, not once in all our together years even though we had that […]