It is five of five in the morning and I am hanging my head over the sofa from behind it, about to awaken a sleeping chef until I realize he is wide awake. I am driving him to an early appointment at the doctor’s office in an hour for a little thing, so it is time to get moving. He is not fine, he tells … Continue reading Reflection: The Current State of Things
The little yellow radio transmitted only two signals clearly despite its glossy, new façade, one of them Christian talk shows and the other a 24 / 7 classical music station. The child had plastered it with colorful stickers and placed it on the window ledge in her bedroom just behind a pair of gauzy curtain panels. Stretched prone on the carpet, she passed idle days … Continue reading Sunday Miniature 2.25.24
Memories that pop up in social feeds can be cruel, but as often they’re so beautiful. Once in a while, images surface as reminders Chef David and I somehow found time to do things together, a lot of things, in the chapter that was life in Vermont. But leisure time seems so elusive somehow in this chapter. We’ve been in our new house for a … Continue reading Reflection: Piloting Through Chapter and Verse
The mountains erupted out of the gaping landscape with impossible might, etched against saturated blue sky with equal parts gravitas and elegance. One wished to capture and hold them, but the scenery never sat quietly for its portrait, and instead wiggled and squirmed disobediently, this moment stirring the heart to rapture, and that, an austere and unforgiving reminder of life’s transience. A sunbeam piercing through … Continue reading Morning Miniature 7.2.23
What is it about permanence that is so alluring on the one hand, and so vexing on the other. When my kiddo was tiny, he developed an appetite for drawing and coloring with permanent markers because they were forbidden. If his tiny fingers found their way around a Sharpie, in short order I’d have to pry it loose and then replace it with a less-desirable … Continue reading Reflection: The Places That Mark Us Indelibly
Every elementary school in this metropolis reeked by May of stale lunch, chewed-up pencils, and a fatigue that hung heavily, everywhere; on the staff it also betrayed itself in their careworn expressions. The dismissal queue came a little earlier every day while teachers crowed deadline reminders over the din of desks jostled out of place, casualties of children headed for the door with an urgency … Continue reading Afternoon Miniature 3.12.23
Constance was not as old-fashioned as her name and in fact the suggestion of youth lingered in her face and hair still, surprisingly, for her age. The woman staring back at her in the bathroom mirror was attractive enough, she reassured herself. Lately, though, she had put on some weight, not too much, but enough to make her tug at her clothing all day unless … Continue reading Afternoon Miniature 1.8.23
There was so much to do yet, too much. Every corner needed swept, every cobweb dusted away. But first all the drapes had to come down and be washed of an entire year’s worth of soot; once clean, they’d flap cheerfully in the wind on the clothes line at the side of the house; a passerby might observe the gauzy sheers cavorting with loud florals … Continue reading Afternoon Miniature 10.9.22
It takes time for the world to teach a child to discriminate, for better or for worse. And so it never dawned on this child, at the tender age of six, that she should not fraternize with her young peer in the adjacent house, where cars perched like relics atop cinder blocks out front and in the drive, where the dallisgrass sent feathery shoots up … Continue reading Afternoon Miniature 5.30.22
I pass a road called Rosa Parks Lane each morning on my way to work. It’s unpaved and does not look like much from the major north-south artery in Wilmington that serves it. Driving past it, were you to turn your head and glance, you’d see the characteristically flat, scrubby, sandy landscape that defines coastal North Carolina, offset by clumps of Loblolly pines with their … Continue reading Reflection: Getting Parenting Right, in the Best of Times and the Worst of Times
Carolina Thinklings 