“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
Y ou Can Listen Here I know where swallows go on mid-August afternoons when the heat bears down on these fields. They swim the air above the grasses, hundreds of them, I could not take them all in, hundreds swinging, creating geometries, criss-crossing paths, arcing the 200 yards from from tree-line to tree-line, making undulations and rivers and coursing at tempos that changed with each upswing, turn and flow back. The trail I cut carries […]
read more
You Can Listen Here This election, this long whooping howl of fury and disgust and moral loathing, will not fix what feels wrong. All we can reasonably hope for is that it will not make national and international problems worse. Something else is going on, a kind of sickness of mood, a blues with a bladed edge, violence in the air, an expectation that worse is to come. In his August 6 essay in […]
read more
You Can Listen Here From the deep tangle of the bordering field, she has appeared three times in a week, always in the late afternoon, slipping between thick goldenrod stalks onto our lawn. This, our August apparition, this tiny fox, pocket sized, no higher than mid-calf, and in the late sun her fur has the gloss of honey. She grazes sunflower seeds, dipping her head, muzzling the grass, looking up and around, chewing, but at the first shift in […]
read more
You Can Listen Here Partially deaf, Willie half-shouts “eighty three” when I ask him his age. He has just hunched up from the rope machine where I watched him hand over hand pull down a hawser to his count of 100. He smiles at me. We shake hands and he asks again, as per our pattern, “Howm I doin”? “Like a million dollars”, I say. He smiles broadly, this short hobbity man who has […]
read more
