On the Edge

 

She wants to lean forward, to breathe in the muskiness of salt and fish and seaweed. She imagines taking a step forward, crossing the boundary between freedom and safety.

Log Jam

Sometimes the thing you want to avoid 

becomes the thing you most need.

For Our Sins

Bless me NBC for I have sinned. I watched public television six days last week. And on the seventh day I went to see an independent film about saving the whales. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa.

The Gatherer

While she wanted to think she was a born writer, in reality she was a gatherer of people. As a child she’d gather friends on weekends to build circuses or act out plays in her grandparents’ backyard. Later, when she had to go away to the church orphanage, her room was where the other girls would come to do their homework and talk about their secret desires to meet boys. (They only got to see them at the Wednesday night prayer meeting and the Sunday morning worship service so the rest of the week their imaginations would run wild.) When she was old enough to get a job and live on her own, women friends from the coffee shop would come over every Saturday night, bringing bottles of cheap wine and platters of cheese and crackers. And then one day she got up enough courage to go to a workshop on writing and found her true calling: gathering women to write their stories.

Between the Lines

she looks for clues
knows nothing lasts forever
that when it ends
she will leave
better off than when she arrived

Trains

Lueders, Texas

Trains, real and imagined, float around in my brain. There's the apocryphal childhood story of a boy who crossed the tracks too late and lost both legs. Or the train that I took with my grandmother to Kansas City to see a doctor who would diagnose her cancer as untreatable. Or the 3:00 AM train that roared past the bedroom window of our small garage apartment in Ft. Worth. Or the train to LA that empties passengers into Union Station with its Dutch Colonial, Moderne, and Mission Revival Style.

I Am

I am wise and loving

I wonder if the world will become kinder

I hear ravens outside the window

I see yellow jonquils and purple iris

I want to make children fall in love with words

I pretend to not care

I feel sad when I say goodbye

I touch my granddaughter’s hand

I worry about the future

I cry when I remember my father

I know that I’m old

I say “Try everything once”

I dream of a small house full of red and yellow

I try to be patient

I hope to live forever

Addiction

addiction comes in many forms

some more problematic than others

I could be doctoring my morning coffee with bourbon

or scrubbing the bathtub 10 times a day

I could be driving myself to bankruptcy

on the Shopping Network

or adopting stray cats and dogs

in contrast, checking email or facebook every hour

is not so bad

Some Mornings

Take your breath away. 

Moving On

Jake left quickly, grabbing his hat, a jerrycan of gasoline, and a handful of matches. He didn't have a plan, just an idea of what needed to go away. The house, the barn, the pickup truck that didn't run anyway. Let the tax man have anything else that was left. There wasn't any insurance so there wouldn't be much of a investigation. If the old man was still alive, he'd be real proud.