Just Reading It

I'm feeling word-less, speechless, 


too many stories and don't know where to begin?


So, for today I offer this... 


The things that are really for thee,
      gravitate to thee.


          - Ralph Waldo Emerson


...which drops my shoulders just reading it.

No Longer Strangers

Jeremy lives in West Philly in a house with a yard. 
He rides his bike across the city to work every day. 
He loves greens. 
His friends are farmers. 
He likes to cook vegetables, just barely. 
But I have a soft spot for Southern collard greens, way overcooked.
He wants to create beautiful things with wood.


It's a lovely thing sharing stories with strangers because, well, then they're no longer strangers...

There's Always More

The kitchen was a mess after dinner. Claire wanted help with her homework. Dad needed his eye drops put in. And as darkness fell, Michael was still outside tinkering with our jinxed lawn mower.

I wanted to slip away. But I stayed and sat at the kitchen table with stories rolling around in my head like a handful of marbles. This goes on all day; the stories rolling part. Not the sitting.

So,while Claire showed me her math page, I scribbled words on a notepad. And then my eyes glazed over; find the circumference using 22/7, or pi. There's a reason why I taught second grade all those years. I know we covered basic fractions, but my memory is leaning toward those regrouping lessons...Okay, boys and girls, let's do this together. Mr. One has too many people in his house so some of them need to move next door to Ms. Tens' duplex. Then we add those people up and bring them down to hang out together under the streetlight and... I've always had a way with words, but with numbers, oh the doubt, even after testing into honors trig in high school. I asked to be taken out. It made my head spin.

I jotted, Claire multiplied and added, the homework got done. The kitchen is clean. And the sweet sound of Michael's saxophone is swinging Dad to sleep upstairs, eye drops in.

I get it. Sometimes I have to wait for things, like the right time to write, but most of the time my wonderful life is happening in perfect time. It's just that sometimes my eyes are only half open to see the masterpiece which I've created.

Take a tour of the life you've created; it's good right now. That's the gist of the conversation I had today with my dear friend, Neeny.

I mean, there was more. There's always more.

Filling in the Gaps

When Paula drove up in her little blue car with North Carolina plates, it was like, well, like twenty years hadn't passed. But I'm pretty sure that's how long it had been since we'd last seen each other. Maybe longer.

We carried our mugs of tea out to the lounge chairs and started...Talking. We didn't waste any time filling in the gaps. We covered a lot of territory for one afternoon; marriage, divorce, mothers, fathers, lovers, children, friends from college, work, love, loss.

We damn near choked on our tea remembering the American History class, Wisconsin Death Trip, where the entire class was stoned 99.9% of the semester. Okay, it was 100%. Our professor, Jerry, had the cowboy boots, the handle bar mustache, a vest with a pocket watch. He was the real McCoy. But that's a whole other chapter. The class couldn't have been called Wisconsin Death Trip, could it?

Anyway, I'm feeling a little tongue-tied right now, and a lot sentimental. There's something about having people in your life who knew you back then:

I'm the one with the long straight hair parted down the middle, often spotted skinny dipping in ponds, quarries, puddles. Paula's got the camera slung around her neck. Nobody had crow's feet.

But here's the thing: we've earned our crow's feet. And our stories too. I'm thinking old friends have a way of handing a piece of you, back to yourself.

That's priceless.