The notes rouse me – guitar strums and then Roseanne Cash singing
”We’re blinded to the beauty of our own lives,

but I was taking all that I could get

For 5 or 6 hours in the month of July

The summer I read Colette”… Read full post »

Damned Jam.

I just spent a week in Paris, alone, turning 50.

Unaware that jams are a “liquid” under Airline’s flight regulations, the security guard surprised me by pulling them out and me aside. My flight was boarding. I am harried and late.

In typical “me” f… Read full post »

Communion on a Sunday Morning in June

Let others to their stone and glass temples fly

As the bells ring out their call

To service.

I service a higher god

A quieter god

Who lingers in the faint beating of the bee’s wings… Read full post »

Inevitably early June makes me think of Paris and of my first trip to France.

The memory blossoms as fully and surprisingly as a full pink peony each year, where one week there is nothing, there is the next a full, lush, fragrant bloom demanding to be noticed by you,… Read full post »

I am the tired in that way that is beyond sleepy – bone tired. Mind tired. Past where the brain and the body say it is time to sleep and awareness is softened by a certain haze as you go through the motions of being present.

All week I sorted,… Read full post »

The seventh grade teacher had lost it. He was yelling at the top of his lungs, “you have no idea, NO IDEA what this is about,” spit flying from his mouth. His face redder than the tie knotted below his Adam’s apple, against the pristine and pressed white… Read full post »

I know all about parenting.

I have one of each.

Oh, yeah, in that way, too, I have one of each: a boy and a girl.

And just for being two, I also, you might add, have an oldest and youngest and what are middle… Read full post »

The dancing lions were expected, the Shannon Rovers less so. For years, I have told myself I would journey to Chinatown for the New Years Parade. For years, this being Chicago, there were better (warmer) things to do inside or at home. But this year, the… Read full post »

5 pm on Saturday night. Getting dressed to go on the town.

Let’s see – I need to get the mail, feed the cats, and oh, there goes the phone.

4 am on a Sunday morning.

Can’t sleep.

3 Deals Fell… Read full post »

“I do poor better than you.” Siblings are notoriously competitive but this was a new arena for them to compete in.

“I will eat beans, and cornbread make do. Like I don’t care if my shoes are new.”

We are in fact eating beans – a food… Read full post »

How to Truly Succeed in Commercial Real Estate

Talking to Strangers – Shelter in the Storm

It was the sort of storm only the prairies can deliver.

The sort where the day before, meetings are rescheduled, appointments and events cancelled, bread sells out… Read full post »

It seems it has always been dark

These past 24 hours

Past 48 hours

48 years

Of dark

In the night I sleep but bottles rumble outside

Tumbling glass on the hard street

I hear them roll away

3 am

Too early… Read full post »

Aug 24, 2009 on Aug 24 1998

This morning’s wind flickers like breath against

the sheer

drapes I hung just now in her room, black as night except for

the one wall I insisted be painted a color:

silver she picks.  Like the quicksilver… Read full post »

Time to Move

December 7, 2009

Time to move I mutter looking out at the fresh snow that landed like ashes on my front stairs

My front walk

Transformed now as utterly by snow as the tropical sands were

68 years… Read full post »

In a Stew Again

Outside, the world is sometimes bad.

Inside, the stew simmers and is good.

It steams the windows up in a cozy way.

I can ignore the world or I can write cryptic messages to it with my fingers –… Read full post »

Jan 6th

I love your hair the woman says, passing by my daughter.
What color do you call that?
Strawberry?  

Mmmm – not really a color my daughter says.
A bit of a fruit bowl maybe, I say glancing at the fuchsia hair with neon orange highlights and purple… Read full post »

New Years Eve Day

The tree is still up at home but the aisles here are being turned into hearts and flower landmines of cards and expectations.

It is the last day of the old year.

Last day to refill all those prescriptions while I am still… Read full post »