At times the rain could be maddening, the repetition. And it got so dark you had to watch your mood or you could slip under. I thought back to our time in Salthill, outside of Galway, when our family came… Read More ›
Memoir
Sunday sermon
No color left to speak of in the woods. It’s ash gray, bone colored, drab greens and browns. The feel of cold wind rushing through a bare forest. Keeping an eye on the creaking trees (they sound like zippers). How… Read More ›
It’s a shame about Ray
Foggy morning walks through Soaring Eagle state park. By December the color has drained down to a dull copper with some last yellow in the leaves. The rest of the landscape is green, cloaked in gray. The deep greens of… Read More ›
Last Sunday in November
So long 54. With Thanksgiving late in the month this year it runs headlong into Christmas and no one’s missing a beat. My birthday fell the Sunday after turkey day and we went back to our favorite neighborhood restaurant, Jak’s…. Read More ›
For Frank
Great big scoops of sleep. Sleep like slipping down a sliding board. Pillowy clouds of sleep to sail away upon. Sleep like disappearing. Woke remembering my uncle Frank, brother to my grandmother, forever single. Why do they always pick on… Read More ›
From the getting clean vignettes
Bob had a beard before any of us. And I never saw him without his baseball cap. Bob drove a pickup truck, chewed tobacco and could always be counted on for having weed. Bob had a canoe too, so one… Read More ›
Dark enough
At last all the leaves were down. I used the tractor to grind them to bits and the blower to scatter the remains. In no time I’d been to Portland and back to the dark of my morning den. The… Read More ›
Salad days
I remember leaving that apartment on Spring Street. It was the first place I lived alone after breaking up with my girlfriend. Spring is one over from Union on the edge of Seattle’s Capitol Hill, inside the Central District. Not… Read More ›
Walter Mitty, Walter White
Can a person die from too much Kringle? I have tried. And why does it all come from Racine, Wisconsin? Why not Denmark? Do Danes in Wisconsin have the actual recipe? This pillowy danish with crack cocaine icing and nuts… Read More ›
Renewal
I went to our local Indian bazaar for fresh curry leaves and bought what I thought was spinach but when I looked at my receipt it said pulsaag, an Indian spinach alternative also known as basella, a climbing vine. I… Read More ›