The second half

I don't remember hiking near the ridge, but my suddenly flailing limbs and the irrepressible urge I have to put on the brakes before I skin my chin makes me suspect that I might be on the downhill side of the mountain. Regardless, in this warm sunshine, I’m completely happy.

A little help

This Christmas Eve sublime

From Walmart's metal shelves

"Be My Valentine"

A Little Debbie sweetly delves.

If Santa's big-box discount store

So boldly asks for more,

Go Tell It On the Mountain, Men,

That When I Fall In Love,

I want the Hallelujah Chorus sung

By a thousand handsome elves!

Calico Christmas

Family is on my mind, that, and the perplexing say-it-aint-so axiom that you can't get there from here.  Missing many, many, and holding the lonesomeness as a tattered calico square tucked in my pocket to touch whom I cannot whenever I may. Threadbare, perhaps, but still, safe, warm and well.

Morning call

Up before dawn.  Yesterday’s ups started early, too.  Sleepy thoughts lingered a while.  But I let a friend’s early morning counsel recede quickly, and, like the cock’s third alarm, it returned to reveal my ingratitude and the longer, narrower road required.  God bless him. I hope I do as well.

Around the block

As William Schaefer’s coffin and entourage circled Baltimore, Norah’s image lay boxed in the gallery, and the layer between my heart and skin seized up.  Exercising all week, old losses, present unknowns, muscles building or tearing?  The Times reported, “he cared.”  May the shopper in my town write, “she helped.”

Almost perfect

I’m planning menus (Sunday dinner and Friday’s royal wedding brunch), an ice-cream truck in the neighborhood is playing “O When the Saints Go Marching In,” and two cardinals and a squirrel are skittering around just outside my window.  Except for the unwieldy swamp-bush-duck-blind menacing the driveway, all is well here.

An Earth Day hue on this Good Friday

Robert’s shade – the temporary patina of blueberries, “the mist of the breath of the wind” – and this morning’s rain painted the receding branch of my sourwood with a starling’s iridescence and made my third cup of coffee darker and more delicious than the first.  This lonesome aching may well pass.