Please note Corby’s relationship to our backyard fence. Yes, she’s on the outside of it. This moment was brought to us by our next door neighbor, who texted me the photo while I was at EMU at Harper’s swim meet, and Jesse was running the Dexter/Ann Arbor half-marathon. Hadley was sound asleep.
What’s truly impressive, after I get over the sadness that I almost lost her, is the fact that it appears Corby jumped the fence. Either that, or she knows how to open and shut the gate and in that case, I’m teaching her how to drive next week.
Last bus ride. I will miss the everyday miracle of the public school bus. I kept thinking someday the thrill would wear off. Someday, I thought watching Harper walk across the golf course toward home after being dropped off, this will dull, or I will not notice it at all. Someday, the creak and crank of the bus coming to a halt, its doors opening, the driver leaning forward to wave and say good morning, the kids climbing on, someday that morning ritual will lose its shine. But it has not. Every day for several years now, the public school bus has been a living testament to the phrase, “it takes a village.”
The graduate. Off to high school where she’ll play the French Horn in the band, swim, and who knows what else this baby girl who is not longer a baby will do?
Enjoying learning how to use my Chromatek Watercolor Brush Pens.
Read:
- The Book Woman’s Daughter pgs 1- 129 – Kim Michele Richardson
- “Summer Afternoon at the Pool,” and “Walk in the Woods,” – Dave Malone
- “I Started early – took my dog” – Emily Dickinson (thanks to Megan Willome)
- Lit pgs 145-220 – Mary Karr
- If you’re in need of it, I encourage you to reconsider what this season might have in store. To embrace slowness, white space, and as much leisure as you can access. To read for pleasure. To write without worrying about publication. To stay present and eat freshly rinsed fruit over the sink and sink your feet into the sand (or wade into a cool lake). – Nicole Gulotta (Her newsletter is a Friday favorite. I look forward to it every week.)
- The way compost smells, and crumbles between your fingers, when it’s finished. Where the melody is going to go next. How elastic pizza dough is if you’ve worked it just right. That the cat wants to be scratched on her chin, or that she’s looking for water. The way the air smells when it’s about to snow. That she needs you to hold her hand. Knowing, Ángel Méndez-Montoya says, is a form of savoring. In Spanish, the words are related: “The etymology of both saber (to know) and sabor (to savor) is rooted in the Latin sapio or sapere, meaning to taste, to have a flavor, as well as to understand.”¹ Over a lifetime of sweet and bitter, we come to recognize the taste of what is true; we learn to sense the spirit of truth in people. – Amy Peterson “Making All Things New”
- My poem on Psalm 6 made it into Charlotte Donlon’s Substack Newsletter, and I love the prompt she wrote from it on her Daily Nourishment offering from her Spiritual Direction for Writers page. Here’s to looking out for what’s been smashed and broken and seeing what there is to be done with it.
Leave a Reply