At the best of times, January can feel like the bleakest month. The twinkling Christmas lights disappear, grey rules the sky and, after any snowfall, the pristine landscape that seems to mirror the blank slate of the new year turns into a muddy mess. This year, however, things feel even more grim, fraught with anxiety…
I'm so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. -L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables) Yesterday, while texting with a friend, I mentioned that I would like nothing more than to fall into fall. Or really, at this point in time, just to fall over, preferably into a large and comfortable bed. This…
I am a keeper of flocks. The flocks are my thoughts and all my thoughts are sensations. I think with my eyes and my ears, with my hands with and with my feetand with my nose and my mouth. For to consider a flower is both to see it and smell it and to eat of fruit is to understand its…
Greetings from the land of the sick. Although I'm not the kind to go to the doctor--a fear of being poked and prodded makes me more than a little reluctant--this time I started to sense that something wasn't quite right: no decongestants were working, too many tissues had been used and, although I had done…
Among these writings was De Anima, which examined the life force in plants and animals, and it was in this book that Aristotle attempted to parse the nature of taste. He was fond of creating lists, and first and foremost on his list of tastes was sweet, which he described as pure nourishment. -Michael Moss (Salt,…
I asked the apple merchant for another,jaunty as Cezanne's still-life reds and yellows, having more life than stillness, telling us, uncut, unpeeled, they are not for the feastbut for themselves, and building strength to flyat any moment, leap from a skewed bowl,whirl in the air and roll off a tilted table. -Grace Shulman ("Apples")After weeks of teasing…
Gracious words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones. -Proverbs 16:23-25I love holiday weekends. For the past three days, I've been sleeping in and relaxing, hoping that, by Wednesday afternoon when I board the flight to New Orleans, I'll be cough-free and almost 100% healthy. Truth be told, it seems…
Tonight the Great Pumpkin will rise out of the pumpkin patch. He flies through the air and brings toys to all the children of the world. -Charles Schulz (It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown) Every year when pumpkins begin appearing at the markets, I go a little crazy--a good kind of crazy. I can't really…
“A certain man once lost a diamond cuff-link in the wide blue sea, and twenty years later, on the exact day, a Friday apparently, he was eating a large fish - but there was no diamond inside. That’s what I like about coincidence.”-Vladimir Nabokov (Laughter in the Dark) It's been one of those crazy semesters--in…
I will be the gladdest thing Under the sun!I will touch a hundred flowers And not pick one.I will look at cliffs and clouds With quiet eyes,Watch the wind bow down the grass, And the grass rise.-Edna St. Vincent Millay ("Afternoon on a Hill")Some days you just want to do something different, go somewhere…
Dining with Dostoevsky 