The day starts one way and ends another. As it winds down we sit in the hot tub talking about important things like clouds and the garden and some other less important things too. I watch the daisies dance in the breeze. It’s getting dark by the time we come in the house and I’m startled
The rain. The rain. I wake again to cool morning air in the room and the sound of rain falling. Gerry throws open the curtains and there is gray outside. There is a pouch of something just under my solar plexus. Panic maybe. So keenly do I feel the passing of time and the absence.
I surface from slumber in prayer and a still, small whisper tells me something I’m prone to forget. You’re carrying a burden that isn’t yours to carry. I know, but . . . I do that so often. I try to justify my worries as if my particular circumstance is beyond the scope of the
On another morning I’m sitting on the deck with books—reading, pausing to be present, and reading some more. A noisy bird down on the ridge behind the trees distracts me. I watch and wait to catch a glimpse of the quiet-stealer. It turns out to be not one, but two, hawks, and of them has
Gerry leaves early for a hike and I putter in the kitchen making pasta salad and a big batch of granola. It’s 9:00 when everything’s done, cleaned up, and put away: the time I head down to the woman cave to write. But the sun is shining and it is warm outside. The deck looks
I’m awake in the middle of the night and my mind wants to race, as minds tend to do in those dark sleep-hungry hours. Once I wrestled, stealing glances at my bedside clock and worrying about how tired I would be at work in the morning. We don’t keep a clock in the bedroom anymore,
It’s the first Monday in June, the sixth since I transitioned to retirement re-imagined. Seven years ago on this day, jarred awake by an alarm before dawn, my mind on the day’s work before my feet hit the floor, I was running and getting ready to head out on the interstate to my corporate office. This