The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry. ― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms There was … Continue reading Reflection: No Use Crying
The season has changed and suddenly I find myself anticipating the holidays. I am the first to condemn the world for jumping the gun on every ‘Hallmark’ holiday, to thumb my nose at Halloween swag on store shelves in August and Christmas décor in October, and so this mood is unusual for me. I offer only the paltry excuse that a sense of nostalgia settled … Continue reading Sunday Almanac: It Is Good to Be Home
Cross the Mason-Dixon line driving north through Virginia (and a small, weirdo finger of West Virginia) and you enter Pennsylvania’s topographically interesting southern reaches, with the Appalachians all around, and the northernmost outpost of Krispy Kreme Donuts in Scranton, home of the fictitious and also delicious Dunder Mifflin. It is what we did Monday afternoon, arriving at Fallen Tree Farm near Carlisle well before nightfall … Continue reading Travelogue: We Three Land in Carlisle
Maybe he doesn’t speak English, my son observed roughly three weeks ago, just after we invited one smallish hound (think mid-sized two-door sedan) into our family. Get over here, please, stat, I beseeched him, and thankfully he and his BFF complied, driving the five hours from Asheville and arriving on a Sunday night. They spent several comical hours trying to address the dog in various … Continue reading Sunday Almanac: Introducing Danger Dog
Over the course of the long holiday weekend I have fairly devoured this novel by Catherine Newman, whose main character and plot resonate with me in 10,000 kinds of ways. The setting for her story is a favorite summer vacation rental on Cape Cod where the protagonist-narrator, a menopausal mom, has returned for a week (the standard annual stay) with her husband and now-grown children, … Continue reading Reflection: Can We at Least Finish This Thing?
During my early elementary school years in Memphis, Tennessee, seems like every child around me showed up to class at one point or another grinning ear to ear, eager to announce the arrival of a new infant sibling in the house. Then on a special afternoon that kid’s mama would step into our cinder-brick public school classroom holding the swaddled infant whilst the older brother … Continue reading Reflection: Siblings
If you work full-time remote as I do, maybe you’ve grown accustomed to the irksome Zoom environment so essential to calls and meetings. (I use ‘Zoom’ here generically like ‘Kleenex’ to describe the many platforms—Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, Slack Huddle—our marketing agency relies upon to conduct bidness depending on client preferences and time constraints and who’s got access to the paid versions and such.) Aside … Continue reading Almanac: An Afternoon With Brownie Harris
Honey-golden, irregular cleaving, sticky, crunchy underfoot crust born of pine sap. The small rectangular wood rosin box tucked into a corner of the massive classroom, toted to the stage for theatre week, at once shimmering and powdery. Pliant dancer feet squeezed like gloved hands into satiny pointe shoes ripped, broken, and pieced back together just so, the shod feet standing in the box, wiggling around, … Continue reading Sensorial Memory: Inside Mom’s Dance Bag
Sitting on the screen porch in my Adirondack chair a couple of weeks ago, wrapped in a fleece blanket, I felt like somebody must’ve on an oceangoing ship in the last century, reclining in one of those graceful wood steam liner chairs. Maybe it wasn’t quite warm enough to be outside on the deck, so the attendant came around with a blanket and some hot … Continue reading Reflection: Good Neighbors and Bad, and Even Famous Ones
I read a quote recently that goes something like, people who knew the older version of you would not recognize who you are now. This might be true, although I believe a person’s essence never changes, and by that I mean, warts tend to hang around—but so does what’s good in each of us, I think, and the good can even blossom if we let … Continue reading Through the Lens: A Rare Glimpse Into an Old Version of Me
Carolina Thinklings 