I’d never seen this photo until my sister sent it to me. Canada, summer, cottage life. Of course I looked down when someone was taking my photo. I’m guessing I’m around seven years old. My parents are in the background over my right shoulder. If I was seven, my mom was forty-one. She looks so exotic to me in this photo, like a movie star all in white with her sunglasses and...
I recently wrote in “A Beautiful, Bracing Chill” about how I dove into the chilly waters of Lake Erie even though I was hesitant to do so. But I didn’t want my ritual swim after a run to “become just one more thing I don’t do anymore because I’m old or lazy or too sensitive to the cold.” Yesterday, I realized Halloween was going by the wayside as well. Every year with the kids we used to visit a...
Who among us hasn’t needed to step outside? Take a moment to calm and gather ourselves. And this is what greets us: a world so demanding our attention and wonder, that all else pales. Behind this black cloud, our moon is brilliant and full.
Maria Popova is a thinker, philosopher, and writer who inspires me every week with her “personal record of reckoning with our search for meaning.” Her website and newsletter, The Marginalian, turned seventeen years old this week, and Maria shared with her readers seventeen of the most important things she has learned—one for each year. I’m sharing her list with you. Click here. Many of her...
Recently I’ve written a few somber posts, like “Facing (or not) the Long Goodbye.” Sometimes I have to do that, to get it out of me. Not that I want to throw it on you, but I believe for all of us there is great value in a sad story. Today is different. Today the sun is shining and the wind chimes are playing an extended set and I remember how much I love October. I got up from...
One of my joys of summer is taking a hot, sweaty run and finishing on the shores of Lake Erie where I pull off my shirt and shoes and plunge into the refreshing lake—floating, cooling off, recovering. Every time I visit the summer place in Canada I look forward to this ritual. But now it’s near the end of September, summer gone, and the morning temp is cool and the run didn’t make me so hot and...
Local readers: if you’re searching for compelling, well-plotted novels with engaging, complex characters, you can visit me this Saturday 9/23 11:00 AM – 4:00 PM at the Albany Book Festival sponsored by the New York State Writer’s Institute at SUNY Albany. I’ll be at my display table, where you can hear the author himself talk about, promote, and sell his own books! I like to stage my...
William Faulkner wrote a southern gothic novel The Light in August that I haven’t read. The title is a reference to a house on fire, but for me the Light in August is a liminal phenomenon. With the light now angled two months past the equinox and casting lanky shadows, the days remain hot. A gap opens in the habits of light and temperature. I sense a difference, the sun steering toward autumn and...
The world is on fire, smoke stifles the air, thunderstorms knock out power, the humidity feels like slime–and the garden is happy.
I’m mesmerized by kinetic art—the sculpture that spins, the mobile that sways—and because of that I’m compelled to hang windows in our yard. Every window is a world, and when a window is suspended, when a window floats or sways in the breeze, another facet of that world is yours to behold. My first kinetic window I sourced from the double-hung I saved from our bathroom remodel. It had the old...
Where Thunder Bay comes to a rocky point I came upon a cairn along the shore. I’d say this is an intentional design—a creature on sturdy legs with arms spread taking in the wide expanse of the lake. It’s a finished work, but I’m tempted to add my own flair, to say I was here too and admired your art. If you look closely you can see what I did, a little weight for each...
All it takes is one tulip to brighten the landscape and calm my mood. Good thing, because all we got at our house is one damn tulip. One! Over the years, the deer have decimated our tulips, yet somehow the hungry buggers overlooked this one. Our one and only and likely lonely tulip. Fortunately, we have the Tulip Festival in Washington Park coming up. We went to gaze at the blooms yesterday...
Dandelion season is my lawn at its finest with a constellation of little golden suns on a spring green canvas. I wish it could last all summer. The blooms set at night and rise in the morning and shine all day, but only for a few weeks, and then the flowers are gone to seed, and a lucky few of them will be new suns next year.
April 20 (4/20) is weed day. The day got its name in the 1970s in California when a group of high school students met after school around 4:20 to get high and 4/20 became a code phrase they could use in front of their parents. Clever stoner types, these high school kids. The reputation of 4/20 spread from there. 420 Magazine, founded in 1993, has a mission around creating cannabis awareness. I...
It’s a bit of a morose group for an Easter Sunday, circa sometime in the late 1960s. Despite the background, this is not a cell block. On the right is the asbestos-laden fake brick siding on the unheated room we called the shanty at the back of my grandmother’s house in Niagara Falls. The wall on the left is the beer distributor warehouse next door. In summer, the wall is fronted by tall tomato...
