Oliver surveyed his beloved street from his front porch, a glass of lemonade in his right hand, an easy smile etched onto his boyish face. It was one of those delightfully crisp days in early fall, with a sky so clear that a person might have seen all the way to Chicago, if only the world was flat. Setting down the lemonade, Oliver unrolled the sleeves of his flannel shirt. With evening fast approaching, the autumn chill had begun to bite. Off to his left, Lake Michigan made a glittering appearance—a sun-speckled artwork framed by the street’s townhomes. The charcoal smell of the evening air filled Oliver with a pleasant nostalgia for his childhood. But Oliver did not wish to be young again—he was having far too much fun being twenty-seven.…
...continue reading
Summers mean walking
every morning, listening to pink and orange
music as the drifting turns into waking.
I see dead birds along the sidewalks morning to morning and think of…
I think differently now, I acknowledge the birds and say my internal prayer
and thank them.
One morning I take an egg from the sidewalk
abandoned, rested on my desk for a week
only to explode while on the phone with a friend.
…………….The windows are down in the still-daylight summer evening and as I make my turns to downtown – teens walking alone/in pairs along the reaches of the sidewalk streets—I see the flashes of lightning in the blue in between rooftops like flashlights
…………….beneath the skin.
…………….With my windows down,
…………….…
...continue reading
The paper is from an outdated Atlas that an elder in my community gave me. She was a schoolteacher during her working life and the wife of a prominent Bay Area artist. She called regularly and asked me to visit her. While going through things she would pull out paper ephemera she thought I could use in my art. Despite my being a real estate agent and Notary Public, she regarded me as an artist.
She remained independent until her passing just this past week. I planned on visiting and showing her this picture. Then her son texted saying she passed peacefully.
As far as using the pages of an Atlas as origami paper, these thoughts were sparked:
It’s interesting to cut the squares out of large pages of an Atlas and then fold them.…
...continue reading
A quiet stairway at summer camp. The scent of redwood trees. We sat on the steps and talked. We discovered each other the night before. That next day, we blew off all the camp activities and spent the day together.
We laughed at each other’s stories. Your voice was soft and low; your eyes younger yet wiser than mine.
We lived too far away from one another to really make a go of it, but we tried anyway. Far from the days of algorithms and the forever-instant-now, we exchanged addresses and promised to write. I wrote to you in my tortured grade school cursive; you wrote back in clean, smooth lines.
All the letters from you I kept snug in a paperboard box. I crave to read them now.…
...continue reading
Have another little piece of my heart now, baby. You know you got it if it makes you feel good. Glenda, my best friend’s mom, harmonizes with Janis Joplin’s gravelly voice like she’s singing the sacred anthem of wild women everywhere. She has a beautiful singing voice, so I try not to be too mad that the song has been on repeat for the last hour, but it’s grating on my already fried nerves. When we finally cross back into Wisconsin, less than two hours from home, I feel like I’ve stepped into my favorite pajamas after a long day. The hurly-burly left in me begins to settle.
Since we were little, Molly and I have lived down the street from one another in a small farming community tucked neatly between sprawling corn and soybean fields.…
...continue reading
Something out of the corner of his eye. A flash of primary color, a sense of a person lurking just beyond peripheral vision. The gag reflex of strong perfume. When he spun around, nothing lurked outside his windows on Central Avenue, besides the ebb and flow of car traffic. Constant distraction right when he didn’t need it.
George Lynch had never suffered writer’s block before. He was a copywriter for hire. Wrote whatever needed to be said. Whatever paid. This project was different though. George had worked on a number of assignments for Judd McBrunt. And Judd insisted on calling, not texting, to further annoy and derail George’s train of thought. Yet he had to pick up. His office being the desk in an apartment in Bellington, a small city along California’s south coast.…
...continue reading
“It is quite possible that an animal has spoken civilly to me and that I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention” – Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
Three or four books lie on my nightstand, commingled with hand lotion, emery boards, and lavender oil. The tabletop suggests the luxury of self-indulgence and the whimsy of arbitrary reading. I always have a thick hardbound book ready, a big long story whose purpose is completion. Self-improvement books also sprawl there, usually by Brene Brown or Gretchen Rubin, explaining how to get happier in my head or in my home. Sometimes I swap out the self-help book for a book about writing, hoping that reading about writing will overnight, subconsciously, develop my skills. A plastic-covered library book gathers dust, my interest as casual as my financial investment.…
...continue reading