After a month spent collecting boxes, I’ve started packing. I’m saving my books for last, because the thought of putting them out of sight for a few weeks nearly makes me weep.
Moving
“Home is the nicest word there is.”-Laura Ingalls Wilder
This morning, I woke up next to our warm dogs in a cold bed. The Chef is back in Indiana. What could ever offer me appropriate solace? Why, a book on George Bernard Shaw and a hot cup of tea!
Shaw and Tea to the Rescue
“A happy family is but an earlier heaven.”
Whenever I hike through the 733 acres of our local cemetery, I have to stifle the compulsion to declaim poetry to an audience of tombstones, trees, and birds. Instead, I turn the words inward, or whisper them under my breath. The shadow-poets I prefer change with the seasons. If winter’s sharp, cold, stinging reach is perfect for Sylvia Plath, then the gloriously still warmth of spring is the natural home for the distilled, profound and subtle Emily Dickinson.
Two forlorn graves and clumps of wildflowers are the perfect audience for Emily’s poems.
*“Nature” is what we see” is the opening line from an Emily Dickinson poem.
Take a seat
“My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.”-Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
“The earth has music for those who listen.”-George Santayana
“Flowers…are a proud assertion that a ray of beauty outvalues all the utilities of the world.”-Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature –the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after winter.”-Rachel Carson
Stone-cold grief.
“Where there is love there is life.”-Mahatma Gandhi
Cityscape against a sunny sky, Easter afternoon
“The sun–the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new life, and hope, and freshness to man–burst upon the crowded city in clear and radiant glory. Through costly-coloured glass and paper-mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice, it shed its equal ray.”-Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist
Baby Maedez wishes you a Happy Easter!
Baby Maedez wishes you a Happy Easter!
An engagement, a marriage, a fantastical blooming: this apartment building has silently witnessed it all. After six years, we are moving. After six years, we are ready to go forward. Into the next phase of our lives. Into the beautiful unknown. After six years, we are saying goodbye to our flat, our neighborhood, our first real home as a couple. The future awaits, somewhere across the river.
Exit Sign
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”-Kierkegaard
“It is by no means an irrational fancy that, in a future existence, we shall look upon what we think our present existence, as a dream.”-Poe
“I don’t fuck much with the past but I fuck plenty with the future.”-Patti Smith
Welcome back, snow! Gee, it’s hard to believe it has been 8 or 9 months since…oh, wait. What? What do you mean spring opened her arms in a warm embrace 5 days ago? Why are you back so soon? Didn’t you get the memo? Have you looked at a calendar? In this part of the world you should be on vacation until at least December, maybe even January. Please take heed of this plea, and skedaddle.
Early spring snowstorm.
Oh, hi there snow! You suck.
A Small Press Life: Books. Art. Writing. Life. Tea. 