Personal Story

The woods were filled with many sounds that day: birds singing, leaves rustling, squirrels moving around.

I was painting a picture beside a stream in the late morning. The stream flowed around many large boulders. This view of rocks and water is what attracted me to this place.

Suddenly, everything was quiet. I mean absolutely quiet. Even the water became quiet.

Everything became unexpectedly still. A great hush came over this place. You could hear a pin drop. And so it continued for about 2 minutes. It reminded me of how it is right before a storm.

Why does fire seem so alive?

That flame on a candle seems so peaceful, so meditative -- like it, itself, is putting out a presence.

A candlelit dinner. How charming.

One of the houses I pass on my walk has a gaslight lamp, that always has a flame burning.

I really like that.

I remember sparklers that we would light on the fourth of July. They’d leave a trail of light in the night air.

Perhaps these things remind us of our own sparkling light.

Did you ever go into some place that had an echo?

It’s so hard not be a kid again. Just to play with it: clap, or say “hello”, or whistle, or stomp your feet.

I am so pleasantly surprised to find places that call you back to being curious, in the moment, childlike, wonder. The New York Botanical Gardens has a fabulous tunnel connecting two buildings that’s just perfect for making echoes. Perhaps it just happened that way. I’m grateful.

You just want to play with the situation. All else stops.

Pedro was a 97 year old man from Cuba who was always at the Senior Center where my wife goes.

She really liked him and would often talk with him.

He was funny, upbeat, and filled with life, dancing even into his late 90’s.

He died. That day our grandfather clock stopped. The grandfather clock had been running continuously for over a year. A few days later, when I opened it to see what had happened, I saw the chime mechanism was incredibly stuck. I needed a force of about 5 pounds to unstick it. This had never happened before.

One of my earliest memories is playing in a sandbox with my brother. It had a striped awning, green and white.

The sand feels so cool, and has an unusually pleasant sensation. It’s similar to putting your hand into a bin of dried corn kernels, or sunflower seeds, or birdseed.

It feels like it is alive in some way, this easy ability to reshape as you move your hands or your feet through it. And it pours, like water.

I love the smell of fresh cut pine wood.

Seeing a house being built is always fun. In particular, looking at, or better yet, walking through the framing – when all the workers have gone.

I am not sure why it feels so happy to do this, but it does.

Perhaps it’s seeing the essence of the house coming out of nothing – an empty lot.

Perhaps it’s the smell of the wood.

Or perhaps it’s a sense of adventure – exploring.

Perhaps it’s the figuring out of what room is where.

Or perhaps it’s imagining, for just a few minutes, this is our new home.

Flip Flops

"Flip Flop I was taking a bath," I think that is the song.
Or is it "Splish splash I was taking a bath"?
I think this was the song.
Hi, it is summer and it is hot.
A lot of humidity in the day here today.
I went out there to do some yard clean up.
We had a really bad storm here in Newtown, CT.
It was actually a tornado a micro burst or macroburst or something like that.
There are branches down everywhere.

I love to see things that are so tangled they defy all logic to untangle or even understand their pattern.

Near our house is a Byzantine church. That in itself is so beautiful when they play the church bells with something like a piano keyboard. Anyhow, there is a huge nettle, a giant, wild hedge with small birds darting in and out.

Hundreds of birds seem to live in there. It is so amazing that they can so quickly and accurately navigate this dense and obtuse tangle of hedge at such a high speed. They must be geniuses.

It pains me to have to recycle glass jars, but we simply do not have room to store every jar we get.

Of course, many items in the store are packaged in plastic or cardboard. The day may come when there will no longer be glass jars.

When I was a little girl, each glass jar was put to use.

I like to see the rain drops after the rain.

Find just the right tree, and they hang there like glistening jewels.

Sometimes it’s the way they decorate a bush like tiny ornaments.

Or on a window pane how they line up all in a row.

And of course, it’s a real find to see a single drop poised on the turning edge of a leaf.

I like to see how they gather together on broad cabbage leaves that are dusty, blue green.

Or how they bead up on the hood of a car.