Month: February 2021

There’s a cleft in the hill across the pasture from where the old house once stood, where, now, only the stone summer kitchen remains, a place to store hay out of the weather. My time on that prairie was short, the city was calling to me, but the imprint it left on my spirit is…

Nights passed in days passing, years passed alone in trains moving over land where there was neither day nor night, clouds nor light, silence nor song but just the humming of metal on metal “I am my own best lover” Michael told me once on a train like this one, apart from time and space, the words as…

Today is the birthday of my oldest and deepest friend, my Kansas prairie brother, my Amtrac brother, my Penn Station brother, my Lower East Side brother, my Oaxaca brother, my Belle Isle with the sunset reflecting in the Detroit River brother. My stand by and support your friend no matter what brother. We share our…

Walking is being physically upon the earth, writing is being physically in your breath, in the air in your room, in the atmosphere when you step outside, in the universe once you look into the stars. The week-long helmet of bitter clouds broke today and the shattered pieces began to scatter as the sun was…

Four degrees tonight and the world is suspended by ice crystals and nearly unbreathable air. No stars, no sun for days, no warmth anywhere and certainly not on this riverbank. The brittle grey sky right above me fades to brutal black at the horizon. Some deep ancestral part of me is searching for firewood in…

In 2021, the Lunar New Year begins at the new moon on February 12. Every year is represented by an animal and an element. 2021 is a Metal Ox Year. However, each animal also relates to an element. The Ox is Earth. Hence, this is a Metal Earth Year. The first element “metal” is called…

The simple phrase “mild winter” needs to be filed away with other hasty prepositions about life and love on the Great Plains. I was prepared to walk after work tonight but the wind chill is some smallish number below zero. I stayed in and whipped up a vegetable curry for my lunch for the next…

Lynn got out of the house quick, as I did, a hasty marriage to an inappropriate person, and a quick exit from the relationship. It’s possible I followed her lead on that, which would be the second revelation in as many posts, born of simply writing the words down. She became my touchstone to adulthood,…

I’ve lived between these two rivers two other times in my life, once, before my marriage, and twenty years later, after it. During the first time, in 1982, when I was in the apartment at Franklin and Gilman, we had a cold spell nearly as extreme as the one this week. I was on the…

My sister, Lynn, is a true war baby, born in ’45, almost seven years ahead of me. I was an ignorant observer to her years of teen conflict, I wasn’t old enough to comprehend either her pain or her struggle. It took me years to realize the impact of Susan’s death on my life, I…