Fertile Sand Hills

Turning Sixty

At fifty, my own life has not come to much and my death sits in a straight-back chair under a lilac bush in the garden behind the house, reading my old letters, waiting. He is in no hurry to come knock on the back door. There’s plenty to keep him interested in the piles of […]

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Another Year Is Gone

The sun sets today in eleven minutes. The sky is overcast, and even on this more temperate day — for last week was bitterly and unseasonably cold — it is cold outside, and November dark. A month ago, hiking in the Fertile Sand Hills, I could not imagine this day. In mid-October the trees were […]

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The Nature of What We Are

Life bores deep holes in us in hopes the nature of what we are might sink into us…. —Jim Harrison There is a truth found in running long miles each morning. There is a realization that comes at the end of the first-half of the run that however tired, however hard the wind blows, however hot […]

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The Air Was a Cold -7

I asked a friend yesterday, “What propels us toward and along our life’s path?”     I have come to believe, I told him, that although I have choice, I choose — have chosen — unfailingly, unerringly and ultimately, my current path. My path is like that of the magnetic North Pole, and I am […]

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A Mother’s Love

I have not had words to write of late. My thoughts have been in Illinois. My thoughts have been of uncompleted things. My thoughts have been a-jumble, off-kilter, scrambling for turf, scrambling for traction, scrambling for a level place to gain perspective, to catch my breath. My mother is dying. My mother. And my heart […]

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Some Other Dimension

To adventure. When I was young, guided by my imagination and the books I read, I adventured. My siblings and I laid planks between tree limbs and called them forts. We pinned blankets over the dome jungle gym and called it a tent. We dropped charcoal briquettes into freshly dug holes to bake potatoes and […]

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