Voyage of the JuicyFruit

Crew member TJ Struthers checks the halyards.

Summer 2022 First Mate’s Log

We've wandered North again, this time to prep our vessel and sail on into the North Channel of Canada. After two plus years "on the hard," during Covid, we had much to attend to. Critters chewed off the curly wire from the ship's radio and wreaked havok in the anchor locker, shredding sticks and grasses …

“We have the power to be rainbows.” Maya Angelou

This morning I read an interesting Bloomberg article entitled “Twelve Rules for Life” by Megan McArdle. (https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-01-30/megan-mcardle-s-12-rules-for-life). I was surprised to see it because these sorts of articles and lists usually appear in January as folks are composing their New Years Resolutions, even if they don’t get past number one, and even if that one …

Memorial for a Lost Poem

My writing teacher loved you. Well, especially: "M&M faced ragsters jumbling pell-mell into a faded pink station wagon at dawn." A morning of summer blueberry picking was what it was all about. Donning belts to hold buckets to hold berries freshly plucked from their limbs. Later, somewhere in the field, a radio blared Diana Ross …

Barn’s Loft

Rafters loom large between rusty nails. A small raccoon peers out diamond at roof's gable. Ladder, missing rungs of course, stands ready. Pine wood, walnut casings, large barrel stuffed with radio parts, Mr. Bowles, struck dead by a mail truck on Henry Street, left treasures up there. Sleepovers, flashlights, sleeping bags, pillows, Tiger Beat magazine. …

What fresh hell…

I love Dorothy Parker's famous quote, "What fresh hell is this?"  It comes to mind so often in the wake of one of the worst presidential tenures this country has ever suffered--that of, well, his name doesn't deserve the time it would take me to type it.  He's banned on FaceBook, Twitter, and my computer …

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 …

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 …