Advent is a penitential season. It’s a dark time for getting ready, a time for repair. It’s that last, slow, ungainly month of pregnancy. Daylight is brief, especially this year in downtown Pittsburgh when it’s been cloud-ridden and drizzly nearly every day. My immediate family is in such disarray of various sorts that other than …
O that my words were written down! O that they were inscribed in a book! O that with an iron pen and with lead they were engraved on a rock forever! For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; and after my …
For my birthday last month, my brother, Jerry, and his wife, Lisa, gave me a small acrylic painting they had bought a short walk from their home in Kensington, MD, at my favorite store, The Society for the Prevention of Blindness Thrift Shoppe. They explained that they chose it because of the huge rough frame …
I’m not good at organized small talk. I dread cocktail parties, church suppers, Christmas parties, big birthday parties, even poets’ wine receptions. I seem never to have anything to say face to face with half drunk strangers wearing name tags. Once at an apartment house cocktail party, I asked the landlord a too obvious question, …
Cuttings Sticks-in-a-drowse droop over sugary loam, Their intricate stem-fur dries; But still the delicate slips keep coaxing up water; The small cells bulge; One nub of growth Nudges a sand-crumb loose, Pokes through a musty sheath Its pale tendrilous horn. from Theodore Roethke’s COLLECTED POEMS, 1948 Besides giving up my pinball machine, the hardest …
I have a low pleasure threshold. I suppose another way to say this would be that I’m easily amused, as if I were living my life as a playful cat. This winter I’ve especially enjoyed watching falling snow here from the condo’s windows when the air currents surrounding this building caused the flakes to …
1. I never saw my grandmother twice with the same colored hair. Instead of the world, she traveled the spectrum— Tahitian Brown, Romanian Gold, Irish Red— without even the pretense of reclaiming tints once hers. I was so embarrassed, my teenaged self was mortified. My grandmother after years of misdagnosis died. Rather than her liver, …
Written on Water: Writings about the Allegheny River, Edited by Helen Ruggieri & Linda Underhill, Mayapple Press, 2013, $19.95. The Allegheny River: Watershed of the Nation, Photographs by Jim Schafer, Text by Mike Sajna, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992, $90.00. Every morning from my condo’s dining room window, the Allegheny River looks different. Not …