The order. "Years and years and years ago" when Mom was still live, I did what my mother had done and decided on solid black, spindleback wood chairs for her old dining table she'd given me. I wanted four chairs, and bought cheap, unfinished chairs and stained and lacquered them matt black. They are currently [...]
There is a novel by Nella Larson called Passing, which includes racial passing by a character. There are other sorts of passing. Passing by, passing judgement, passing the mashed potatoes. A running dog passing another is called a go-by and it's a good thing. Passing over, we die. Years pass too, time passes. But not [...]
Yesterday, though it is October and cooling, the sun was bright overhead and we got in our two beach walks. A huge broken V of birds flew south so fast we were not able to identify the species. Not Canada geese, who fly slower and in a tidier skein and honk. Gary suggested cormorants. The [...]
I am reading historical fiction just now. The E key on my keyboard has warn down to a splotch—it's happened before. I had trouble getting to sleep from dwelling on memories of attack. I am waiting for the light so that I can have my walk. I am trying not to make things worse on [...]
When I throw an email away, it goes in Trash, but my system also selects what it understands I do not want to see and puts it in another folder as Junk. Junk never appears in my Inbox. Periodically, I review the emails in that Junk folder, just in case something is misdirected. What I [...]
"It's not funny," my husband said after staring at the cartoon above. There is a nasty rumor I found on the Facebook page of someone trying to friend me. It claims Ford's father was a CIA assassin. Seriously? This should be reported to Mulder immediately. And Scully. Today, I wanted to turn away from [...]
The rape scene is explicit. I taught The Bluest Eye for 25 years. It is an extraordinary novel told from multiple perspectives. A little girl is ruined, driven insane and lost. The language is stunning, beautiful, masterful. I introduced the novel with an early event where a narrator describes being sick and feeling her [...]
