Gerry returns from the sea with sufficient salmon to feed us for the coming year, and the sizzling heat of the past week gives way to a gentle rain. The silence of the past few days becomes the sound of living our ordinary days. I needed the solitude and silence and protected the boundaries I
I’d like to have something to turn to find Seven Steps To . . . get to the other side of what challenges me. Something concise, steps to take, boxes to check, and a measuring stick with which to note progress. Surely someone has crafted such a thing. But no. Of course not. Though many
I think of quiet. The world’s cacophony assaults and I hunger for silence, I bathe in solitude at every opportunity. I make space for these. One morning when I am not thinking of quiet, I am distracted by a different stillness. I look up and listen. For surely I will hear a whisper in this
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 spend a couple of hours in the garden, pondering, imagining, making decisions, and tossing tiny seeds in the ground. I’m toting tomato and pepper plants outside every day and bringing them back in the house in the early evening. There are seed packets in my purse, and basil growing in my laundry room. These,
I spend a silent and solitary day at home: writing, reading, potting flowers, staking tomatoes, and watering plants. But it is that moment when I’m standing barefoot on the grass in the backyard watering the tea garden and breathing in the gentle scent of lilacs that is, perhaps, the sweetest. I drop the hose, walk
The house is silent. Gerry is out having coffee with his cronies. Maya, not quite herself after a dental procedure the day prior, snoozes on a blanket in the den. I carry a vase of grocery store flowers downstairs to my woman cave and set them on my writing desk in front of the north-facing