You don’t get to watch a Peony blossom, it is quick and sneaky, surprising you one morning with its glory and scent. Mischievous nymphs are said to hide in the petals of the Peony giving it the name Bashfullness. Thus spring is established and declares that it is here to stay. School is out and [...]

He had come to visit this family as the fifth grade boy’s teacher; concerned. Beyond the boy there was a fifteen year old girl homeschooling herself because their single mom held two jobs and there was the four year-old sister to take care of.
He came at what he figured would be after dinner, not wanting [...]

Stan’s illiterate grandfather, Luigi, came over from Italy and homesteaded this place, 288 acres, secured the water rights and raised a single son, who, in turn, raised a single son. The neighbors pronounced his name Loo’ gee and gave him their respect for his hard work and agility at learning English.
Each of the three generations [...]

Angelina left the church - surely you saw that coming from the first time we met her - before she married Jaime. She didn’t bother to tell the monsignor; her vows, in her view, were to Christ and not to what she deemed his failed church. Even as she would be married to Jaime, she [...]

She knew he would be gone when she woke up. It was his annual three-day steelhead fishing trip with his buddies. Well and good; she would sleep in a little, let the dog have his place on the bed, and make the coffee a little weaker this morning. They never brought any fish back. They [...]

We learn what we do. We become what we do. He spent thirty six years at the mill, starting right out of high school, turning grains into dog food. He was a mill worker, competent and proud of it, always chosen to show new hires the ropes. He had his other identities too: husband and [...]

“I know I’m younger than you, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know what’s best for me.
“I’m just saying that I need more of you.”
“More of what? I cook, I do the laundry, we screw, what more do you want?
“I mean I need less. Less of you rolling your eyes and spending your time at [...]

A fisherman can make a poor living guiding fly fishermen on the Ausable river. Renting out a couple of canoes to pleasure paddlers is easy money on top. Marking up a lunch box for customers is easy, but takes getting up earlier. But the season is short, so the total is meager. There used to [...]

They are warming up to play at his uncle’s funeral procession. Uncle Vos was his mother’s brother; a big man, mustachioed and smelt of garlic and often of tequila too. He did not live with them, but visited three or four times a year for a week or so. There were picnics and presents; he [...]

The few who can remember who and when the Fourth of July activities were begun don’t agree on either who or when. There has been no attempt to reconcile the differences, folks just say, “It was either Bob Quill or Nell Starmup more or less around 1970 that started the bike race. Maybe it was [...]

The birds stay every winter and the two of them feed them potato skins now. After her parents had died she married what seemed like the nicest guy in the nearest village, and he came back to her little farm; barley and potatoes on about an acre. He was an adequate farmer and in due [...]

He feels like her uncle, or a big brother to her. To her he feels like a friend, her best friend. It’s important to her because now there is no father. There was the divorce that at first was just the logical and right thing to do. But, perhaps for the same reasons that the [...]

When I was younger, adults often asked me; “What do you want to be when you grow up?” And I answered, truthfully, “An eagle.” Now, when they ask and I give that still truthful answer, they say; “No, no, not in your fantasy. You will be a woman when you grow up. What do you [...]

When he was eight he wanted to grow up to be a hunter. His dad was a duck hunter and had taken him out to the duck marsh on opening day. His dad was a fine wing shot, but he was more impressed with the duck calls. His dad did the loud two-quack call designed [...]

“I have leprosy, Hansen’s disease. I am a leper.” She said and moved herself and all of her stuff off to a shack at the end of this road. “Nonsense” we said, though we understood that she might want to be alone for a while after the accident.
Nonsense we would say when we visited in [...]

I am a stooper, my dad was too; ya know what that is? I’ll tell ya. People love to bet at the horse races. A lot of them know what they are doing and a lot just don’t understand how the system works. I mean the parimutuel system that the tracks use. Ya make a [...]

We go over to the cabin at Rocky Fork for overnights, never more than one night at a time. We go home the next morning, apparently valuing the day at home more than a day at the cabin, or even a day at the cabin plus another night there. Yeah, the cabin is an overnight [...]

He sits by the window with the shades drawn; light enough for writing, not too bright for his sensitive eyes. He writes every waking hour, now down to eight per day. The Meals on Wheels lady comes at midday; she reads out loud what he has written since the last meal. The medical technician comes [...]

My friend described Phoebe as a cocktail lounge singer of extraordinary range and also a contortionist, an absolute must for the Flying Dog Brew Pub. The deal was arranged, and a piano wrestled through the door. She had heard about our sheriff; “I like big men, he’ll turn the music pages for me;” and he [...]

Hippies, music, dogs, outdoors, and yes, some pot. And it just wasn’t occasional, it was regular. Ricoh did it, and did it well and always, in the hippy vernacular he was a “fun hog,” in the good sense. He brought a jug, danced with the fat one, took a set on the drums, never groped [...]

When he stands here facing the light, with darkness behind, he is at the outer edge of the galaxy looking in. From there he can see everything; the clusters, the nebula, the nova and supernova, sparse dust clouds yearning for birth, drifting hydrogen clumps, and lumps, those cooler and more dense planets where sometimes there [...]

Back in their own village, in the old country, the family was regarded as a bit at the edge, but they were certainly never excluded from any of the cultural ceremonies; they were accepted for what they were. Here, in New Orleans it was different..
At first they had been welcomed and studied, perhaps in a [...]

She grew up to be a teacher, largely because the aunt that she loved and who loved her back was a teacher. She loves working with the children, and much of her reward is that she can tell that they like being with her and find apparent joy in doing the things that she leads [...]

Leah had grown up watching movies. Her parents owned and operated the Lyric theatre, it was her perpetual babysitter. Mom took tickets while dad set up the projector, then the two of them dimmed the lights and changed the reels, and she sat in the third row, center seat – always. She added some shelves [...]

I said, “I need to go to the desert for a couple of days.”
“Alone, again?”
“Yes, alone.”
“Do I irritate you so much that you have to get away?”
“No, it’s not that.”
“What, then?”
“I need the silence.”
“I can give you that.”
“No, I need the silence of the desert, and I need to stare, like at a rock or [...]

NYT 2/25/10  “The man accused of shooting two children Tuesday at Deer Park Middle School was allowed to enter and leave the building hours before he opened fire in the parking lot… did not know what motivated Mr. Eastwood to open fire in the parking lot …”
NYT 2/24/10 Front page: “FEARING LIMITS, STATES WEAKEN GUN [...]

The way to the Himalayan heights passes through Nepal’s villages, and there is much reason to make a village the night’s campsite. Not the least of which is the universal tea house. It’s elementary economic geography that in a country where walking is the only manner of travel that villages would find themselves roughly separated [...]

Wishes; do six-year-old girls have wishes? Did I have wishes that I can remember from around first Grade? Mrs. Smith asked who could spell squirrel, Joann said immediately, “S..Q..U..I..R..R..E..L, skwerl,”  and I wished it had been me. I wished not to be in short pants. I didn’t wish to take a nap while Mrs. Smith [...]

In the normal course of a middle class American life twenty-five-year-olds would be in their third year of their first job after college and dating would be about long-term relationships. These dudes didn’t go to college, they are musicians.
They call themselves “The High Jinx” and their own songs are often about getting high. It’s a [...]

He: is being as clear and logical as one beer will grant him. “We can fix up the bathroom for $8,000 and that will add at least $12,000 to the value of our trailer. We can stay in Doug’s joint in Puerto Vallarta while the work is being done, that’s cheaper than staying here, we’ll [...]

Chicago in mid-November is cold, bitter cold. We’ve just finished a heavy lunch at a German restaurant, heavy because, well, it’s our last one together. And the German restaurant because that was where we had retreated after the attack and tear-gassing on that August 28, 1968 afternoon.  We were SDS then, Students for a Democratic [...]

Rosa’s older sister is engaged to be married, and watching the two lovers together has charged her own sweet romantic fantasies.  These fantasies have largely eased her fears that her mother’s anger and increasing disapproval pinpoint her failures. It’s true that school did not go well this year. She cannot imagine her future happiness diminished [...]

Their mood is as gray as the day and as the water flowing by; not light, not dark, just gray. They have met weekly like this for years, always in gray places; the train station when the next train doesn’t arrive for another hour. They had gone to Herbert Hoover High School together, class of [...]

She had mailed off the manuscript two months ago, to Harcourt Brace, the London office. It was in the style of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, yet even longer. It is the story of her life’s journey, blown off course by the death of her parents in an unusual auto accident leaving her to [...]

Robert Bergman published this book, “A Kind of Rapture,” in 1998, and I missed it until this particular solstice.  A forward by Toni Morrison and 52 headshots, no words, not even page numbers, so astonishing; yet ordinary. Immediately I recognized that, “This is what I have been trying to explain to myself and you.”This is [...]

So I published a book in 2009, along with 200,000 other Americans and even more Brits. How do I explain this to myself, or to anybody? Why would a grown man publish;  “to make publicly or generally known?” Judging by the amount of time and effort, indeed team effort, it must be something that I [...]

I do care where I am and who is there, but mostly I’m inside me taking care of the differences between what is inside and what is outside. This place and everybody in it is outside. Only I am inside, and it’s my job to put that place in order.  I am the only one [...]

What do you do with the lady’s horse that she leaves with you after she’s left you?  Well, it wasn’t the horse’s fault, though the big mare was part of it. The rest of it? There were the twins; she brought them up them with their ponies, and then with their show jumpers. I ran [...]

Ever since she was old enough walk alone around the block she had been told the same story; “Angelina, there are ghosts in the house with the four broken doors. There were four bad men and women who used to live in there and the devil came to claim their souls, leaving their spirits behind [...]

The crows came the same day that the rabbit got caught up in the tangle of barbed wire at the edge of the garden and died for twenty minutes. The same day that the letter came. It was clear that any attempt to rescue the rabbit would make things worse; best to just keep the [...]

“Let’s go sit on the bench in the park for a few minutes” she will say when my mumbling turns into tongues with greater volume, the pitch going up and up. I know when I am scaring her. I am scared too. What is going on that so much sound comes from me with out [...]

Drive in, drive through, drive by; so very American. Quick-Mart, Quick-Wash, and Quickbooks software to keep track of the money part. The quick-greeting; “Harya?” or “Howzitgoin?” Leisure is at best a late night talk show.
America loves the instant; instant coffee, instant gratification; also youth, beauty, celebrity, health and guns. Health and guns? Strange bedfellows. Americans [...]

Aaron and Molly live across the fifth fairway from us and are the only folks we know - or need to know - in the development. Aaron was Ben’s teacher, and Ben is what he is today because of that. I got this note from a former student, and know what it is to be [...]

After the baby came she gave this sweet shrine to Jill, who had no desire for a baby, and thus gave it to me along with the story. She had been disappointed in childlessness for years. She believed that the Virgin Mother would respond to the care and devotion that she put into the shrine’s [...]

Cooked an egg for the guy. Called mom. Looked at myself in the mirror as I showered; ugh, time to diet, exercise. Yesterday’s mail, a surprise there from an old chum, she wants to go from accountant to teacher at age forty five and has enrolled at the university. Read the New York Times, and [...]

Imagine, if you can, the inability of people to save themselves from themselves. The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide goes up past 480 parts per million, then past 550 ppm. Oceans wipe out coastal areas, widespread desertification, in struggling over scarce resources the earth becomes a place of war, pestilence and famine; life for the [...]

The middle pair of windows on the third floor let in the light and summer air. These apartments are two windows wide and twenty feet long. Her kitchen is a microwave and toaster oven, the bathroom includes the only sink and garbage disposal. She makes her living tutoring rich city kids for college entrance exams. [...]

She said, that while she was asleep, a snake had come and licked her ears so clean that she could hear the future. She wore a python skin belt, her undies sport a diamond back rattler pattern. She blinks a lot, and with each blink her gaze is redirected.
Her prophesies are always conditional, “If you [...]

The well digger was the unofficial Mayor of Cardonal, oh, for at least the last twenty years. In Cardonal well digging is not done with machinery attached to a pickup truck? it is done with a shovel and a bucket. He dug down and hauled the stuff up to be thrown on the beach.
Church every [...]

Celtic women were often warriors alongside their men and, like all Celts, celebrated life and its warfare with wild Druidic ceremonies of drink, dance and song. Brighid, named after the goddess and the wife of Aengus, was one such. As a warrior she was admitted to the noble class and thus conversant with the druidic [...]