I was nine years old, wandering through the front door of our home after school. On the table in the foyer, beneath an oil painting of ocean waves building beneath troubled skies, the first thing I notice is the latest Life magazine. The cover? A large glossy black-and-white photograph of girls my age, wearing a similar type of narrow-waisted cotton… Read More
A Father’s Passing To be with a person as they die,is no less miraculousthan seeing them born. It is a labor, a rhythm that ebbs and flows, in waves.The eyes half open, stare at something we cannot see.The mouth falls slack,The breath strains. You take their handYou bend over, whisper “SqueezeMy hand if you can hear me.I love you.” The… Read More
Say you are a child. A wide black paint brush in your eager hand set to paint a white, deep bed freezer in the backyard wash house. The paint color, a rust-proofing, log-cabin brown. Say you feel important. You have a Saturday afternoon task. A job to protect the freezer from the ravages of a humid balmy gulf coast—- air… Read More
We think we know what it means. That story. The one we know from the book of Genesis: A Garden, a serpent, a tree, a naked woman and man. The apple was never there, but added for a painter’s ruby poisoned globe, a scepter with which to Blame: Undocumented refugees Right wing evangelicals Liberal queers Welfare queens. East Coast elites…. Read More
Before the first light of dawn, I see her black silhouette along a neighbor’s back wire fence. Her back legs caught and twisted, she drapes across the top of the metal fence at an impossible angle. A graceful leap cut short, her nose now angles down, only inches above the snow banked ground. I suck in the chill air lingering in… Read More
The summer of my tenth year I learned to jump. It wasn’t Molly who taught me to jump. Her pet ram did. That was during a week spent with my friend Molly on her family’s home near the hill country of Texas. Charlie held court beneath the blue shade of a live oak, in the front yard of the Molesworth’s… Read More