It’s Sandy’s birthday today. It’s a Tuesday and we both had work today and will again tomorrow and, we just came off a few days without power or screens. We’re getting over the tech withdrawal symptoms. So we won’t be letting the dogs out tonight, as the saying goes. Plus, we nod off by nine … [read more]
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Time Lapse
Image: Mary Oakey The Boulder Weekly holds an annual 101-word fiction contest. Thousands of entries come in. I made the finalists list a couple times a few years ago. It’s good practice. Here’s a new one, that’s actually not fiction. Time lapse Walker packed for his Monday morning Munich flight by noon Sunday. It was … [read more]
Pardoning Saint Patrick
I’m a fourth generation Paddy. My great-grandparents came here in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, I am told from Cork, Ulster, and maybe some islands near Scotland, through Canada and Boston, then on to Colorado. I don’t feel Irish, nor do I have any particular affinity for Irishness. Or, at least … [read more]
Feeling my way along
February 28, 2024 I wrote this last week, wanting to dig down deeper and share something honest with you, something visceral and true. I read it now, and it feels like fiction, or someone else’s story. Clarity has returned today, self-doubt gone on hiatus. But last week it was like this: It’s dimmer now, the … [read more]
Freeing the Doer
It snowed a foot-plus in maybe ten hours Saturday. The temperature was warmer, from the high twenties to high thirties, yielding a heavier, wetter, upslope snow. Though we’re on a quarter-mile long dirt road in the mountains, we get plowed right away. But the porch, walkways, gravel driveway, and cars need to be cleared. … [read more]
Only ash and sand
Only ash and sand January 30, 2024 Possessions aren’t always what they seem to be. I first collected sand for this bowl, or an earlier version of it, from Isla Vista beach in Santa Barbara in 1974, down the cliff and the rocky trail from where I lived. It’s still the same sand, I think. … [read more]