"What are we talking about in 2020? Kobe Bryant, Covid-19, social distancing, Zoom, TikTok, Navarro cheerleading, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylore, and...The presidential election. A country divided. Opinions on both sides. It's everywhere: on the news, on the late-night shows, in the papers, online, online, online..." -Elin Hilderbrand (28 Summers) I read an…
It's easy to get swept away by the everyday: barking dogs, disrupted sleep, the feeling that you are waiting for something that continues to elude you. I realized recently that our lives in Delaware, or what I've come to refer to affectionately as "Limbo Land," can seem fairly one note; this may be because, as…
What happens to you doesn't belong to you, only half concerns you. It's not yours. Not yours only. - Claudia Rankine, qtd. in Tayari Jones' An American Marriage If you pay attention to such things, you may have noticed that many books and movies, before launching into their primary narrative, have a little section--a…
Meanwhile, Peri found solace in literature. Short stories, novels, poems, plays...she devoured whatever she could lay her hands on at the limited library at school. When there was nothing else to be found, she read encyclopedias. Devouring everything from Aardvark to Zombie, she came to know about things that, though of no current use in…
(Greek) light acquires a transcendent quality: it is not the light of the Mediterranean alone, it is something more, something unfathomable, something holy. Here the light penetrates directly to the soul, opens the doors and windows of the heart, makes one naked, exposed, isolated. - Henry Miller (The Colossus of Maroussi), qtd. in Tony Perottet's…
A burgundy leaf fell from the Japanese maple and landed upright in a spinach artichoke dip. It was chilly in the shadow under the tree. Soon, there would be the long winter, cold and white. An erasure of this night, the garden. -Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies) When I last left you, it was high…
We have all been brought up on stories from the "Panhandle," the northern part of Texas that is truly the shape and just as flat as the handle of an old pot iron skillet. Perhaps the most famous tale is the myth that in winter there is nothing between Amarillo and the North Pole but…
I open up this time so I can feel all the other time around it. I can see it in sharp focus: a difference of this or that, the light or the dark. I am choosing the light. -Sarah Gerard (Sunshine State) Adulthood is a funny thing. You may think that you've attained this…
Having come so close to losing everything, I am freed now of all fear, hesitation, and timidity, and, once revived, intend to devoutly wander the earth, imbibing, smelling, sampling, loving whomever I please; touching, tasting, standing very still among the beautiful things of this world, such, for example: a sleeping dog dream-kicking in a tree-shade…
Jimmy and Crake graduated from HelthWyzer High on a warm humid day in early February. The ceremony used to take place in June; the weather then used to be sunny and moderate. But June was now the wet season all the way up the east coast, and you couldn't have held an outdoor event then,…
Dining with Dostoevsky 