Bill Pearse

Recent Posts - page 30

• Waning crescent

  By Bill Pearse on September 17, 2023 • ( 14 )

  

  Here it was, my whole life splayed out before me. Some days, just for an instant, I felt like I could do anything. The problem was, it felt so good I dwelled in that feeling and did nothing at all…. Read More ›

• Portrait of the artist as a portrait model

  By Bill Pearse on September 8, 2023 • ( 16 )

  

  No one smiles in these old portraits. They look stiff, like they’re already dead. Maybe it’s the knowledge only portrait models have that makes them look like that, deciding how you’ll look forever. They look trapped in their own time…. Read More ›

• When the pines begin to cry

  By Bill Pearse on September 3, 2023 • ( 16 )

  

  It had been a long time since I heard the owls cry in the night. Last night in bed I counted three in the distance, a hoot-hoot with a menacing tone. It reminded me of waking in Marrakech to the… Read More ›

• After blackberry picking

  By Bill Pearse on August 24, 2023 • ( 10 )

  

  I remember the day Lily and I came home from our road trip. We’d left Utah on a Sunday morning and reached Seattle by lunchtime on Tuesday. Hadn’t driven more than six hours a day, surprised by how quickly it… Read More ›

• New school blues

  By Bill Pearse on August 22, 2023 • ( 0 )

  

  In the dream I am in my underwear and we are in a crowded public square this time of year, this going back to school time we are all of us in our underwear in our dreams looking down, wondering… Read More ›

• Bookending

  By Bill Pearse on August 20, 2023 • ( 15 )

  

  You could see where the landscape fabric was poking through the bark I put down in the beds and that rankled me. I hated seeing the irregularities, the underlying scheme. I could get really anal retentive like that. We noticed… Read More ›

• Sand tray therapy

  By Bill Pearse on August 11, 2023 • ( 10 )

  

  It is here I feel most at home. Oil City. The worst name for the best place. No oil, no city: a developer’s name, a get-rich scheme. There is no imagination in the name only nature here, no boundaries or… Read More ›

• Work ID

  By Bill Pearse on August 6, 2023 • ( 10 )

  

  I went back to work. In the last year I’d only worked nine weeks, two short contracts. Now I had a contract through the end of June, 2024 with the possibility to extend by another six months. The certainty felt… Read More ›

• Knowing what it’s like to be a snake

  By Bill Pearse on August 4, 2023 • ( 12 )

  

  It was there on the trail I saw the snake and saw the world from that point of view To be a snake and never know what it was like to drive a car, read a book, or drink a… Read More ›

• There’s nothing soft about softball

  By Bill Pearse on July 30, 2023 • ( 21 )

  

  My whole body hurt. Softball made me do things I normally wouldn’t do, like sprint. Or leap. I even stretched for as long as I could. Swung the bat, rolled my shoulders out. Still I was stiff for days. I… Read More ›

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