Tag: family
-
The Wild Things
When my grandparents were still alive they lived in the remote Pennsylvania woodlands in a small stucco and stone home that my grandfather built himself. I spent a summer there just before my teens. I remember wandering through my grandmother’s garden of dahlias and snapdragons, mesmerized by all the color. I remember afternoons spent curled…
-
Dispatches from the Exercise Front
If there’s a gene for proclivity to exercise, my family doesn’t have it. Give me a choice between a vigorous bike ride and curling up with a book and I’ll take the book every time. I got away with it in my twenties because a heavy backpack and a university built on a steep hill…
-
The New New Car Experience
Seat yourself in a comfortable position. Relax your shoulders, relax your face, let your tongue rest loosely in the center of your mouth. Feeling at ease? Now observe your reaction when you read the next very short paragraph. Car salesman. I’m guessing you feel considerably less relaxed. For decades the process of buying a car…
-
Being Candid
Sometimes I wish I enjoyed photographing landscapes more. They’re so blessedly…stationary. Because if there’s one thing I’ve learned about taking pictures of children and wildlife during even my short tenure behind a camera, it’s that it’s extremely difficult to capture them in their natural state. One tends to run towards you, the other away. I…
-
Eighty Six Christmases
I suppose I feel as if it’s my job, along with taking care of my mother’s financial and medical affairs, to try to convince her that as long as she’s alive there is joy to be found, at least occasionally, somewhere, from something. In pistachio ice cream or lights on a Christmas tree or a…
-
New Camoldoli Hermitage
I had been looking forward to a few days alone at New Camaldoli with unseemly eagerness. When August arrived I had a broken elbow, a dodgy lower back, and a fretful elderly mother who thought I was going specifically so I’d be out of her cell phone range. I spent the week restless and preoccupied.…
-
Not Going Gentle
Do not go gentle into that good night,Old age should burn and rave at close of day;Rage, rage against the dying of the light. For the past few months I’ve thought about little else, and I think about it gingerly: Dylan Thomas meant something more noble than this. * * * My eighty-three-year-old father is…
-
State of Grace
I. The Burial of the Dead Winter kept us warm, coveringEarth in forgetful snow, feedingA little life with dried tubers. When we pull up in front of my parents’ house I notice the trees first. The almond whose slender shimmering leaves splashed my bedroom walls with pale green light as I studied Eliot, then Heidegger,…
-
Wild Hunt, Part III
The brindle had been living alone with the Adam-children for six months when the fox hunters came. The Odin-daughter had passed on five seasons before and the Odin-son, lasting far longer than Cu Fail prophesied, three full seasons after that. He had warned the brindle of the Wild Hunt’s coming, but she had seen no…
-
Wild Hunt, Part II
Although she could no longer hear the Adam-daughter’s movements, the old black dog knew by instinct and subtle vibrations that she had risen in the early morning light. The Adam-daughter looked puzzled and tilted her head in the manner humans adopted for their ineffectual ears as she walked down the hallway toward the living room…
smallstonebuddha 