Sunday Quote

If I were asked to give what I consider the most useful bit of advice for all humanity, it would be this:  Expect trouble as an inevitable part of life, and when it comes, hold your head high.  Look it squarely in the eye, and say, "I will be bigger than you.  You cannot defeat me."  Then, repeat to yourself the most comforting words of all, "this too will pass".

- Ann Landers

Close of winter walk

Look closely.  Do you see the prints on the ice?  Geese, I imagine, plodding over the frozen lake daydreaming of warm skies and fat little bugs and green weeds.

Citizens of the small lakes (as we call them, truly they are large ponds I think).  Tired of winter as we are.

Doesn't this blue sky hint of warmer days?  Yet the end of winter has its own beauty, the way the earth always insistantly reminds us that despite our digging in, everything changes constantly around us.

the little birds in the reeds and bushes were making quite a racket.  Nearby at the high school despite the cold, the kids were out with coaches practicing sports, running with an ease and grace as I stumbled around hard earth that shifted to mud slops that hid mangled tree limbs...this would make a fine obstacle course, coaches!

Across the way the little library looking very remote in the wilderness except for the busy road that fronts it.  The park still bears the ravages of the previous year when I did my first Spring walk and was so sad to see the big willow gone, so many other trees gone, but just two days ago we saw a swan and are hoping to see it return.  Come Spring perhaps.

 

 

A new poem out and about

A new poem, First Light, is in The Manhattanville Review at this link: http://mvillemfa.com/journal/

Happy to share the online pages with so many great writers.  Off to work so the rest of you get out there and enjoy the day which will be gorgeously warm from what I'm hearing.

Lowestoft Chronicle's Anthology

Ever so pleased to have my story, The Exit, included in this great collection of writing about travel and wanderings with a good dash of wit and whimsy.   If desired, you can purchase it here. 

They have a new issue out online as well of their terrific journal - you can access it by clicking here. 

Sunday Quote

 

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.

 

- Charles Dickens

Sunday Quote

Life is a shipwreck but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats.

-Voltaire

First night in Charleston

Only we would head to Charleston, South Carolina for a mini-vacation and have them declare a state of emergency the day we were supposed to leave.  We debated, we went anyway.  It was cold, true, but not as cold as we are in New York.  Around the corner from our hotel we found this gem, a French restaurant called 39 Rue De Jean.  Absolutely charming.  The waitstaff are all dressed very French and they are very attentive, the decor is lovely and the food was quite good.  We adored the onion soup.  It reminded us a good deal of a place we used to frequent years ago in Brooklyn called McFeeleys only with a French twist. 
Afterwards we walked around the blocks near the hotel, a bit rainy, a bit windy, rather chilly, but in a wonderful mood from our dinner and just from being out and about.

 

Sunday Quote

i lean back and feel
the warmth of you traveling
from one place to a/
nother.  and i am gone.  home/
bound to where you also live.

- Sonia Sanchez, Tanka

Posties about ghosties

Quel horror! The glowsticks all conked out after an hour.  Hoarding of leftover holiday items to the rescue - little battery operated tea lights we purchased for Halloween so the pumpkins wouldn't burn down the house with candles - then Halloween got crazy and we never did carve pumpkins, just let them sit in full vegetable glory on a bench outside.  These work even better.  Look out, late night dog walkers! (Our little skittish dog was thoroughly unimpressed).

Snow ghosties

Have wanted to make snow ghosties after seeing first a Calvin and Hobbes where he made a snow army and secondly, a bit in a book about winter activities for kids where they said put glow sticks in as eyes.  A perfect storm - no pun intended or maybe yes - of snow day and leftover glowsticks from Halloween.  Enlisted youngest son (by means of lobbing snowballs at his window) but he did not share my delight so much...and then we had to shovel out the driveway.

Sunday Quote

Who's gonna take your place, fill your shoes?
Who's gonna take your place, fill your shoes?
You never used to look behind you, that isn't what you'd do
Didn't leave a thing behind you but the miss you blues.

- Mark Knopfler

Sunday Quote

He saw clearly how plain and simple - how narrow, even - it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one's existence.

- Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows
    

Snow and shadows and sweet gum balls

We had a sweet gum tree in the back yard growing up.   It fell to me to rake up the spiky sweet gum balls when they fell, sometimes an old sheet spread out in the yard, full of them.  The tree was huge. 
My father, who loved a nightly fire in the fireplace dearly, got the idea that they would be the perfect kindling one early winter and built up tiers of twigs and sweet gum balls, balled up newspaper, and a seasoned log.  He struck a match and at first the blaze was fantastic.  Then what must have been thousands of tiny insects came swarming out of the sweet gum balls where they'd been apparently lodging.  I remember clouds of insects, my mother leaping up horrified, my dad rushing around opening doors and windows and sheets of newspaper and waving the bugs outside. I was at that turning age - just young enough to appreciate the drama and excitement of it all and yet old enough to experience the humor of the situation.  Over the years, whenever I come across these spiky wonders on the ground, I wonder how many other people have tried the same experiment with the same results? 

Sunday Quote

A new heart also will I give you, and a new spirit will I put within you.

- Ezekiel 36:26

Sunday Quote

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity.  The fears are paper tigers.  You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.

- Amelia Earhart

Sunday Quote

The Angels were all singing out of tune,
And hoarse with having little else to do,
Excepting to wind up the sun and moon
Or curb a runaway young star or two.

~Lord Byron

Mary Poppins

The umbrella, the author's own, as well as her own doll.  Bits and string snips from the New York Public Library's fine exhibit of children's literature.  I had an ardent love for Mary Poppins growing up, a doll (plastic with long brown hair and her own carpet bag), the record which I memorized, a patient Mother who took me several times to see the movie.  Last year's wonder, meeting Julie Andrews at a local bookstore, the Voracious Reader,  - worth the wait in the cold.  She was elegant, warm, and gracious.