Spring cleaning comes when I just can’t take it anymore. All the cobwebs we haven’t seen, the dust, the feeling the whole house smells. Everything needs to be taken apart and blown out. A half pot of coffee followed by… Read More ›
parenting
Leading the witness
3/24/18 Pulling into Wenatchee on a Friday night just before dark. The Olive Garden family restaurant, a long time since I’d been to one and longer still before I’ll go back. Charlotte, slap happy / punch drunk on two Cokes,… Read More ›
Stones and bones [cemetery song]
Once you make a major purchase (house, car, major appliances) things invariably start breaking down and costing more money. Things break in multiples, the same with bad omens (in 3’s, 5’s, 7’s, like the number of days you can expect… Read More ›
‘Something out of nothing’
On the twenty-first floor of the Grand Hyatt hotel I stood at the window in my bathrobe looking out at the high-rises and cranes above, mountains in the distance and ferryboats, all the people looking back in at us. I… Read More ›
White-gray on the color wheel
In the 19 years I’ve known Dawn it was maybe the second time I’ve seen her hungover, one random Friday in February. And though it was set to snow and I tried a new gumbo recipe, built a fire, she… Read More ›
Dead selves cleft off
Though it snowed, it looked like fake snow, like film set snow, as I walked across the grocery store parking lot, past the primroses for sale all covered in plastic. I checked out a curry restaurant on a side strip-mall… Read More ›
The fullness of empty spaces inside us
I sat in the den watching Ginger chew the water buffalo horn, the wash of drool that makes it slick and hard to maw. I scratched the webbing behind my knee that’s been giving me trouble. There was a mild… Read More ›
Poem written for my daughter on a cell phone
How hard you wanted for that moment and lifted your chin for a scratch and so vivid it was, as you forgot — and the feeling hardly a memory or a glance, the way with dreams you’re sure it was… Read More ›
Discreet Music (MES edition) | Jan. 24, 18
I’ve lived out here since ’96 and always had a good attitude about the rain, that it’s just November and December which are hard, that by the time you get to January you’re over the hump. Not true! It doesn’t… Read More ›
All the best reindeer have Chinese eyes
I stuck my thumbnail up my nose, stepped over the pee stain on the rug, went to the bathroom, wondered how Brad could live here for a whole month and put up with us, and how we live: that pressure… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 