“In such a world of conflict, a world of victims and executioners, it is the job of thinking people, not to be on the side of the executioners.”- Camus
When I read the jury has returned a verdict, I get out of the house, grab the trowel and walk a straight line to the southeast garden that gives up to Spring first. I haven’t touched it this April. Withered stalks have trapped layers of leaves and cheatgrass and carpetweed are obeying their pathology, their roots already deep, their filaments seeking out fresh space in broad circles. It feels good to wrench them out, beat the good soil away and flip […]
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I had written material for teaching — lesson plans and reports and speeches and other similar kinds of forms and records, but I began writing for another purpose in earnest in January of 2011, a few months before I retired. I knew that teaching had released many things in the uncertain, timid boy I had been that I had never felt before, and two of them were a need to […]
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I cannot bear to look at old photographs of myself in my 20’s or beyond, or recent ones either. I either look like the prince of nerds or a bullet headed soccer hooligan. Now, with my face giving up to gravity like splashed jelly sliding down a wall, I am grateful for the masks of Covid. But I do like to look at timeworn photos, the ones whose names no […]
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My wife will tell you she’s done better paintings and truthfully, some of her horses looked like gods, but “One Sunset” is my favorite. Over 10 years ago, she stood on a slope above the Pew Estate main house and looked south across the valley of the French Creek. She began outside in spring and then came back to her studio and finished it in a few weeks. This painting […]
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