September 15, 2011 – 7:09 am
I am always a bit melancholic as summer gives way to fall, and this year has been no exception. The change of season reminds me that the first anniversary of a dear friend’s death is looming. The boys have gone back to school, I have a birthday around the corner, a deadline to meet, a season’s worth of commitments made long ago that are now upon me. A week ago, I could feel my own personal dark cloud settling over me like a cloak. And then, almost on a whim, I enrolled in a two-day course on Reiki healing. Last…
For years my friend Maude has been saying that we should go to her little cabin in Maine. Somehow, although we talk about it every summer, we’ve never actually managed to set aside the time to make the trip. Leaving home means finding someone to water the garden, tidying up the desk, answering the emails, making sure that kids and husbands and dogs and all other commitments are covered. Easier to murmur, “someday, maybe,” and put the adventure off for another year. I’m so glad that this time, when she asked, I just said yes. It’s a five-hour drive door…
He didn’t need training wheels anymore, but there was no way our cautious little boy was going to let us take them off. My husband didn’t say it, but I knew what he was thinking: “The kid will be twenty, and he still won’t know how to ride a two-wheeler.” Up and down the driveway they went, Steve patiently urging him on, a hand at his back, seven-year-old Henry earnestly pedaling. It was past time for this bird to fly. But he was afraid to test his wings. So, we did what we always did in our old neighborhood: we…
“Tug on anything at all,” naturalist John Muir once wrote, “and you’ll find it connected to everything else in the universe.” I sit alone at my kitchen table on this April Monday morning, waiting for the sun to slide up and into full view. I watch a pair of chickadees trading places at the feeder. And then I type these five words — “tug on anything at all” — and wonder, is it really that simple, is everything really connected to everything else? Am I but a single strand of thread, inextricably woven into some billowing cosmic fabric? It is…
