Life feels new to me today. We closed our play last night, you see (and this word, “closed” makes it seem a Much Bigger Deal than it was, as it only ran two nights. But we are, for now, a small school), and so the day feels less compressed, less hemmed-in than the last weeks […]
Read moreToday we had rain. I bought umbrellas for Bill and me way back in January, when the drought we had been suffering all fall and winter appeared to be abating. It had been so long since we’d needed an umbrella, I didn’t remember ever seeing one in house or car, and when the January display […]
Read moreThe pictures are getting old. Don’t you think, O Reader, O Disappointed Visitor of this blog, that the pictures are getting old? And yet. And yet I have Nothing For You. Nothing. It’s not like I’ve tried. I’ve hardly been on the internet in days and days and days. Tonight, for the first time in […]
Read moreWe need rain. The city of Durham– no, the entire state of North Carolina– is experiencing the worst drought in our history. As of yesterday, we have something like 52 days of water left. That’s not a very happy thought. If it doesn’t rain (and in this land of perpetual sunshine and blue skies, that’s […]
Read moreWhat is a day? Twenty-four hours of sixty minutes each, and these divided into sixty seconds. You’ll sleep for eight of those hours, if you’re lucky. Today was a beautiful day: cloudless blue, mid-eighties at the highest, virtually humidity-free. We spent it indoors, painting. It had to be done. The disaster happened in January, for […]
Read more“Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer’s day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men’s stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o’clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft […]
Read moreWho has seen the wind?Neither you nor I.But when the trees bow down their heads,The wind is passing by. *** In first and second grade, I was petrified of the wind. We were living in Japan and were subject, from time to time, to some pretty fierce storms. I learned about typhoons during the typhoon […]
Read moreWe woke up this morning to the snow coming down. The children were outside in it before 9 a.m. In the beginning, school was on a two-hour delay, but it wasn’t long before it was cancelled altogether. Living in the South, where there are only three snow plows to cover three counties and, apparently, No […]
Read moreEvery morning on our way to school, William reads the temperature. It appears in Fahrenheit on a little digital screen just above my head and, when I push the button, it reappears in Celcius. William likes to practice the conversion in his head, then have me check to see how close he got. Of course, […]
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Some of my spare time of late has been spent pruning roses. In April? you say. Yes, in April, and now in May. My roses are running riot all over the fence on which we intended them to climb, the fence Bill put in for me when we finally pulled those red-tip bushes out and […]
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