Every Good Morning

Each Tuesday with children I become myself multiplied, and yet my attention becomes neither scattered nor diluted. It occupies layered frames of reference, as it did in the classroom. Those layers, each, intensely, gather impressions of the faces of both mothers and children, their gestures, emotions, emotions masking other emotions, levels of attentiveness, their crackling show of personalities, and over time, of character, as it has set and as it […]

Even when I dream of solitude, I know I cannot endure it. I imagine some cabin near Katahdin, the two of us deep in January at the end of a road, daylight at 8, lights on at 3, silence all day, feeding a fire in the stove all day, the phones useless, just books and walks and the existence of winter bears. Then the crazy would set in. I’m the […]

The dread is with me every morning and sets more deeply into me each day of what I think of as slippage towards an apocalyptic time to come.  My imagination plagues me. My imagination wakes me up, and at 3 or 4 in the morning I conjure visions of what this country has done to itself and how much worse it will become. I do not know how to shut […]

Joe Pye Weed grows to eight feet and spans a distance in its blooms the length of my outstretched arms. The rain and heat of these months have made it the richest spot for butterflies we have ever seen here: Buckeyes, Swallowtails Tiger and Black, Eastern Tailed Blues, Hummingbird Moths, Pearl Crescents and Monarchs. We cannot count them, there are so many, and they move from bloom to bloom to […]