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Honesty.
I am an open book. I haven’t always been that way, because while growing up, all of us kids had to learn not to rock the boat. Dad had a bad temper, and a little thing could become very big indeed. It was trauma to the nth degree, and it created lasting trauma. Last evening,… Continue reading
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The selfish life.
Maybe that title is a little misleading. What I’m thinking of here is about the time I take for writing. My first urge was to write that I am “selfishly” taking some time this morning to write when I “should” be cleaning house. Sean is still asleep, though, so I don’t want to make too… Continue reading
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What dreams may come…and go.
The moral of this long thread is this: NEVER quash your kid’s dreams. Never let their siblings quash their dreams. Let them dream and dream BIG! You don’t know what they can do. Let them find out. Support them unconditionally. They will love you for it, even if they end up in corporate America, staring… Continue reading
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Happy Valentine’s Day.
How do you know if it’s the last time? Continue reading
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Strange dreams, indeed.
My daughter is not of this earth anymore, but she has come to me in dreams since she died in 2009. Dreams are funny things. They can be nonsensical, or they can be vivid, or even prophetical. The women in my family tend to dream in strange ways. One of my grandmothers saw those who… Continue reading
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Snow on the rooftop.
There is literal snow on my rooftop this morning. The flakes are coming down thick and fast outside the window of my Maryland home. It’s beautiful. I never tire of the look of it and the silence that accompanies it. Growing up in Texas, I saw exactly one snowfall in my time there–1974. We made… Continue reading
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The world according to Didion.
While I was studying for my undergrad degree — as a working adult — I encountered the author who would change the way I looked at the world. I was already a fan of Steinbeck, Hemingway, King (Stephen), T.H. White, and poets such as Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson, and Maya Angelou, among others. But I… Continue reading
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The work life.
I have worked since I was 13. That summer I worked for my father at his building supply. He was an entrepreneur who built a large construction business from nothing. We moved to Houston from south Georgia when I was a toddler, and he started working first as a carpenter, then as his own boss.… Continue reading
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Stay in the moment.
That is the best advice I received as I started out on the cancer road last spring. It might sound like hollow advice to you, something a person tosses around casually these days, but it truly gave me something to hang onto during the worst days. Rather than being an idiom on a plaque in… Continue reading
About Me
A writer and solitary soul in the mountains of Western North Carolina.
