But we're all looking for the place we belong. And what is home, anyway, but what we cobble together out of our changing selves? Maybe there isn't any it, as my friend said, only the longing
Yesterday in his hospital room my husband asked urgently, Will you move me twenty-six thousand miles to the left?Yes, I said, not moving from my chair. After a moment he said, Thank you, adding in won...
The past is in the wastebasket.
I had always wanted to write but thought you needed a degree, or membership in a club nobody had asked me to join. I thought God had to touch you on the forehead, I thought you needed to have somethin...
Being cautious is new territory; my specialty was leaping, not looking. These days I pay attention. You can stumble uphill as easily as down. Ice comes in smooth and corrugated. Plastic bags are slipp...
Here’s what I love about painting. It’s not about words or voice or tone or point of view or narrative arc (perish the thought); it’s about the way certain branches stick straight out from the trunks...
Grief is not a pleasure, but it makes me remember, and I am grateful.
Dogs are never in a bad mood over something you said at breakfast. Dogs never sniff at the husks of old conversations, or conduct autopsies on weekends gone wrong. An unexamined life may not be worth...
Drip and fling and pour color onto the glass. Then I push the paint around. You have to have some faith. If it looks like nothing, if you think you’ve destroyed what might have been a good painting, k...
You can appreciate things at four in the morning that would go right past you during the day.
If you were to look into our apartment in the late morning, or early afternoon, or toward suppertime, you might find us together sleeping. Of course a good rainy day is preferable, but even on sunny s...
I was in love with a poet. I'm in it for the pleasure, I told my poet once, in a moment of bravado. The poet grinned at me. I'm in it for the pain, he said. It ended sadly. The kind of ending where yo...
He remembers what I forget and I remember what he forgets. It's too late for either of us to make another old friend.
Don't worry, I say, putting a PG Tips tea bag in her mug. It's been happening for years. It's not getting worse. Besides, I'm not hearing voice, I'm overhearing them. I just don't know what they are s...
There is nothing like calamity for refreshing the moment. Ironically, the last several years my life had begun to feel shapeless, like underwear with the elastic gone, the days down around my ankles.
THERE ARE ENORMOUS HOLES IN MY EDUCATION. I left college in March of my freshman year and never went back. I’ve never read Moby-Dick and it’s probably too late now. I know nothing about the history of...
Part of what I've learned is that if it isn't life and death, it isn't life and death.
My definition of fear is that it's a constant companion, a sidekick, riding you like a watch, going in and out of the days. I don't live like that anymore. The fact that I'm sixty-three has something...
It's easy now - it's middle-aged lady, nobody's looking, nobody notices. I go without lipstick if I feel like it, and I always wear my comfy clothes. It's a life with fewer distractions, but should so...
It isn’t just the dying part; it’s the thought of the day coming when I will have already dead five, ten, two hundred years. All those centuries piling on top of me, like so many fallen trees. The fa...