Good Mourning

Is there ever a good mourning? Recently my mother passed away followed the next month by my mother-in-law. Two very different, loving women whose nine decades were filled to the brim with what mattered most to each of them, and family was right up there. The Covid19 pandemic altered the way in which we were …

Be the P.O.O.P

Our neighborhood group has turned into an exhausting string of email complainers.  Someone's dog pooped on someone else's grass.  Someone else's dog pooped on someone else's grass and failed to bag it up.  Someone else's dog pooped on someone else's grass and the dog's owner took it upon themself to place the dainty orange plastic …

Helios and Selene

Helios and Selene A thick, deliciously dense and ferny woods beckoned behind our house when I was young. This other world presented itself next to a small white church, obscured behind a few modest homes in our gritty working class neighborhood. Beechnut, pine, ferns, moss, and decaying wood all sent up a heady amalgam of …

Plastic Trash Dip Anyone?

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CIOinnFpFTz/?igshid=125fxif2mc5z

“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

I've been thinking quite a bit about a poem written over one hundred years ago by the poet T.S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."  Written in 1910, the poem was immediately cast into a new category of poetry called modernism, "a literary movement at the turn of the 20th century that emphasized …

It’s All in a Morning

I have a preference for poetry and short stories over novels and non-fiction.  I read a story a day, and maybe a few poems when I have time. Certainly reading and writing take up the bulk of my days now.  Winter is coming and I know that this will be even more true as the …

Republiturds or Libertards?

A recent comment on a blog: "It's not about what I'm saying about them. It's about what I want to do to them, and that is unprintable." .....putzes, diabolical, dangerous, narcissistic, con artists, a dangerous cult, The Great White Hope, the Great White Hoax, drumpf, T-rump, perverts, sex traffickers, cannibals, democRATS.... "Trumpism as innuendo and …

Heritage Oaks

Three of us stood under trees at the end of a long crumbling asphalt driveway joking and talking about the upcoming election. To our right, a large culvert, filled with water from recent rains punctuated the bottom of green grassy slopes leading upward on either side to distant houses that couldn't have been more different. …

Greta Thunberg: How She Became a Leader of the Global Climate Movement – Rolling Stone

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/greta-thunberg-climate-crisis-cover-965949/ Greta is an amazing young activist who inspires so many of us. You can read more about her here.

Natural Resources as Our Legacy

I don't usually get political on my blog posts, but today I am going to. So if that upsets you, you might want to go back and read a different post. This one is about our environment. Christina Wood, an environmental law professor at the University of Oregon, lives in Eugene, Oregon and is the …