The month wore on. Though it was cool at night I left the windows open to hear the rain slap the patio. The light was different now, and struggled to make it over the trees. The grass had gone to… Read More ›
mindfulness
Letters and passageways: the summer of ’98, south of France
I went back to that summer I spent in the south of France, to recall what I could from my journals, letters, and photos. They resurfaced with the news of a friend who’d died, I’d last seen there—and played on… Read More ›
Song for late summer
The kids take pictures of me napping at unflattering angles. The first colors of fall start along the highway: the pink-purple fireweed against the green, the coming yellows and browns. Those black spruces leaning in the muskeg, long patches of… Read More ›
The wind through our windows, Anchorage
We tottered down the runway, wriggling inside the plane. Pale lead morning, 18 years since I’d flown to Alaska. That weekend before 9/11, the end of the tourist season, closing down the shops. Our kids now taking pictures outside the… Read More ›
Broken clouds
Charlotte starts therapy today at the same time as Lily, which means by late afternoon the three of us will each be talking to different counselors in separate rooms, with Dawn waiting in the lobby with her book. It’s afternoon… Read More ›
Song for April, the draw down
How the sky draws down, this time of year, when it’s newly spring: there is no urgency to its ending, not like fall or winter: it is the start of the long days of haplessness, the spooling out of light,… Read More ›
Regret
I imagined the house quiet, after they’d left. I could hear the memory of their voices as they were now, an echo. I could feel my heart pull in the way a hand contracts to a fist, the way a… Read More ›
Lisbeth Salander will have her reckoning
The upsetting quality of the music I play. The look of my hair after several days without shampoo. The sense I should be outside but don’t feel like it, the look of the snow after it finally seeps into our… Read More ›
Nowhere, slow
The spent tea bag stapled at the top, the icicles dripping on a Saturday afternoon freed from any thought of what time it could be, spread out like a soft cheese with hair unwashed, snow with nowhere to go, nothing… Read More ›
“Little time”
In the late, gray January morn you have already moved on. Though the evergreens stand like Japanese watercolors in the fog, you’re making breakfast in your mind, making plans for the day. Though springtime stirs, but has hit the snooze—… Read More ›
Bill Pearse 