Parenting, it is argued, is most difficult when your kids are young. When the likelihood of their choking on a cigarette butt found on the ground at the neighborhood spring festival is high. And there are those who believe that parenting is most difficult when your kids are older. And the likelihood of their smoking... Continue Reading →
We're metal, we're 'Mericans. We mine it, we make it, we drive it, we drink it. We're metal. We have it in our teeth. Our joints. Our jewelry. Our music. So when they told me I had toxic levels of metal in my blood: mercury, barium, and lead, I said, "Toxic?" I am not toxic.... Continue Reading →
via Daily Prompt: Acceptance Of all the things that have saved my life, my sanity, or at least brought survival into the realm of possibility when none existed before, acceptance reigns. And whether I was surviving a moment, a month, or a catastrophe, as in a really big lifetime blow, acceptance did the job of... Continue Reading →
Bear. I dream of grizzlies. Living with them, loving them, talking to them. Polar bears, too. All kinds of bears. They have appeared in my dreams so many times over the years I lose track. A totem? An ally? I don't know. I have dreamed that someone gave me bears to tend as I would my... Continue Reading →
If they weren't so darn beautiful, crooked, twisting, and popping out their little blue berries like a Christmas pie, the allergies that the Juniper trees give to me might be less tolerable. Awww, nope. Just kidding. Completely take that back. Beauty aside, Holy Juniper! Intolerable. Achooo! I don't care how miraculous and interesting they are.... Continue Reading →
My oldest daughter Riana was fascinated by numbers when she first discovered them as a child. Numerals actually. She had no concept, really, of what numbers were, no understanding of value or measurement. When she was a toddler these were words she knew and knew she liked. Funny, now she is teaching statistics, but then... Continue Reading →
Walt Whitman reportedly said that he wished his early work could be dropped into oblivion, well, ditto that, Walt. I believe the only reason that most of us high school kids had our work published in this sweet little journal, Mosaic, was that we were brave enough to submit. Okay, that's the only reason my work... Continue Reading →
I just finished Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run, his amazing autobiography. I have never read an autobiography. Or a biography. Or just about any non-fiction. Try as I might. Every new year's I renew my resolution to read outside of my favorite genres. 'Read non fiction, biography, essays, not just fiction and poetry,' I command myself.... Continue Reading →
"Move the shoes," Thom Sherratt told me. I was 25, newly married, and my husband and I were in counseling. We needed it. We used each other to argue with our own cast of demons, those that crept nightly into our dreams, born of one dysfunction or another, and most of them articulate, funny, and... Continue Reading →
I can't say that I remember the exact moment it happened, I mean it's not like your older brother just suddenly likes you after years of teasing and tricking. For some, sibling love develops very slowly. I do remember the night I noticed something had changed, and my hero, my older brother Pat, saw me as something... Continue Reading →
pocket poet 