Life is like the 55 meter indoor hurdles run by klutzes for its briefness and the lack of elegance with which we all get through it. Family gatherings during the holidays offer the opportunity to take stock. How have you been and what are you dancing with now? Jamming multiple family events into one day…
I wonder what the Mourning Dove says to the squirrel as they both dine at the seed buffet dropped from the feeders to their feet. They both look around timidly, ready to dart to safety from threats real and imagined. But they’ve learned to coexist with each other, knowing deep inside that this other species…
I was walking into a store to pick up a gift card (‘it’s the season for gift cards), enjoying the warming sunshine and relative tranquility offered on a quiet morning in a mall parking lot the week before Christmas in America, when my moment of bliss was turned upside down by a car alarm beeping…
The chess board and the calendar are one and the same. For each demands strategy and each is a game, of reaction and discipline and boldness in kind. I marvel at masters, while struggling to keep more than two moves in mind I marvel at poets as well, for my words betray me as…
The neighborhood has worked diligently to clean up every fallen leaf of Autumn. Lawns neatly mowed in uniform stripes, offering green carpeted bliss house after house. But one house stands out like a shaggy-haired hippy at a military parade. Piles of brown oak leaves mix with maple, dogwood and a dozen other trees. The piles…
My favorite walks are November walks in the woods. The leaves stir underfoot, announcing your progress for those who would listen. And I have no doubt they listen. Deer, fox, squirrels and rabbits for sure, and many more I don’t consider. But I’m not here for them today, I’m here for the land, and the…
It sits perched atop its fellow stones, neatly laid as a capstone of sorts. Who’s hands laid this stone? A farmer from the earliest days of this nation? Or perhaps their grandchild, the last generation to farm this land before the young turned to the mills or went west? Once the land surrounding the wall…
“Who made the world? Who made the swan, and the black bear? Who made the grasshopper? This grasshopper, I mean- the one who has flung herself out of the grass, the one who is eating sugar out of my hand, who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down- who is…
October 7th and there’s no escaping it now. The morning concedes more and more of herself to the greedy darkness. Darkness, not satiated, comes back for more sooner and sooner each afternoon. The days are more beautiful than ever this time of year in New Hampshire, there’s just less time in the day to enjoy…
I took a walk on a local rail trail during a lunch break. The trail brought solitude occasionally interrupted by fellow walkers, joggers and cyclists. But not really solitude. There were glimpses of frogs warily looking back at me, chirps of chipmunks announcing “here’s another one.” as I walked by, and a distant hum of traffic…