When we found out the kids’ school was cancelled for snow I made them stay up with me until midnight (Dawn was gone), they both fell asleep on the sofa, we’d been out in the storm past 10 and the… Read More ›
musings
Someone called ‘The Necromancer’ is on the line, and they say it’s really important
The smartphone moved with him from room to room as a torch in a dark and threatening castle, everything outside its light potentially harmful. And in public places where people otherwise had the chance to connect now they didn’t, they… Read More ›
Winter takes Queen
One of the signs of getting older is realizing there’s only one sweater you really need and then sticking to it, hanging it like a coat in the entryway for quick and easy access: and because you happen to be… Read More ›
More posts about baths, please
How impossibly dark it gets here in the afternoons sometimes. I lay in the bath with the pork roast brining and thought about the father-daughter Valentine’s dance at the community center, the one coming up that Charlotte seems so excited… Read More ›
‘Why we try’ | on symbols and habits
The way the sun came through the windows made it look like lattice, the shadows of the tree branches on the window sills. I thought about dropping mom at the airport, but really thought about it because I’d thought about… Read More ›
The sweet smell of woodsmoke mixed with ocean spray
I pulled into Portland around sunset, crossed the grated bridge through the city limits, two fingers of light left on the horizon. Hard to keep my eyes on the road with the snow-covered volcanoes on my left, the sky turning… Read More ›
Trump, Orwell and the carnage of lies
Last year I read 1984 after we’d gotten back to Germany, in February. I was sick and feverish, and finished it in two nights. In the preface it said Orwell had lived through two world wars (he died shortly after… Read More ›
Whether we feel it or not, the earth moves beneath us
It was the first night this year that didn’t fall so hard. If it had been a theater production and a light cue, they changed the fadeout from 30 seconds to 60. Though unseen, hope stirred underground and you could… Read More ›
All the walls are fake
Lily got a 4.0 grade point average her first trimester in middle school, Student of the Month award, two certificates, did a pirouette as she announced it, shook her hips, raised one foot over her head in a yoga pose… Read More ›
Just like the landscape
In the way other people’s minds probably do, mine moved along a band of topics in the middle of the night like radio stations or a wheel at the fair, a big arrow that stops and settles. That’s how it… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 