Category: Uncategorized
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Elephant Family
The matriarch is named Gaia. She has led them hundreds of miles from the savanna through salt flat to a river where they can drink. Thirst slaked, the herd continues south to the Okavango delta, passing through veldt rife with lions. One night, the parents must scramble to shield their young from the big cats.…
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Speech Delay
Twenty-seven months, with a speech delay, my son has not started calling me dad. But he acknowledges me anyhow. For instance, lately, when he wakes upset at 3am, I am often the one he reaches out to in the pre-dawn dark. Most of the time, a soft pat on the back and some reassuring words…
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Kitchen Sink Soirée
The top of the dish soap bottle drips unused suds, like melting wax down the side of a tall candle placed beside a grand piano at a salon soirée, the sink an instrument for performance every evening after dinner.
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Easter Tradition
A tradition we had growing up was a couple weekends before Easter, dad would cut down a tall lilac branch from one of the shrubs in our yard and put it in the Christmas tree stand. Only starting to bud when he brought it into the house, we hung the bough with dozens of eggs…
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The Path Ahead
Guidance for the Path Ahead There is no guarantee of safe passage. Security is a flimsy veneer, a fiction we agree to less each day, that papers over the brambles and wolves. In times like these when thorns outnumber fruit and as night falls the pack starts to close in, do not forsake your wits…
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Catch and Release
It started with a black widow who crawled out of a rolled-up rug when we moved in with each other. We both felt sad that I killed it. Though we agreed it posed a threat, we shared remorse at its demise. No more vanquishing arachnids. Each who scampers across the floor, scrambles up from wall…
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Ode to Dolce the Cat
for Josh She lapped at a teacup filled with warm milk while her companion sipped a White Russian. Together they applied their minds all night to the nature of subatomic spin – which is not well understood, much like a cat. Nina Simone on the record player, the hours past midnight unwound toward dawn when…
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Seeing at Night
Some things are best observed with peripheral sight – a star at dusk whose light has just emerged; sidelong we can perceive in a darkened bedroom that a child asleep in their crib still breathes.
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Down With the Bad
More than a month since a back injury left her housebound, she’s better enough now to walk through the door and down the steps into the driveway where her car is parked. Cautiously lingering at the threshold, she tries to remember the mnemonic her physical therapist suggested during an appointment the other day. “Up with…
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Thistle
Soft down, spikes that blister fingers – I did not expect thistle sprigs in a vase with vintage roses, yet it does make a kind of sense: horticulture mixed with wildness to remind us about the thorn bred from the stem centuries ago. This floral contrast intrigues me, between variegated petals – delicate swirls of…
From the Firefly Galaxy 