Lament
I come to this winter season—this icy interlude of cold and snow and thin light–lonely. I am struck by the yawning emptinesses once filled by friends and family and colleagues who are now gone. This…
Category: Kindred Spirits
A Tribute Especially for Tony
Never underestimate the universe’s brilliant, complex, and astonishing perversity. Salish Elder Tony Incashola and long-ago friend and historian Bob Utley both died on June 7. Their deaths–and their lives– shadowed June. I knew each in…
Small Grandson
You gotta love a seven-year-old grandson who can’t get over the odd pattern in the tines of a salad fork that don’t exist in the regular one. Or asks that his next birthday present be…
No Cloudy Days
My Simon, my white ghost, my sun-seeking companion left this world Monday afternoon. As always, my heart breaks more viscerally when my cats die – than even the humans who’ve lighted my way. In their…
Connections
A couple Saturday nights ago, I gathered by Zoom with my sister, Sonja, and her two sons, Ben and Tim, and daughter-in-law Lori. Borne of the exigencies of COVID when a summer reunion proved unwise,…
Now, This Day
You and I would agree, I think, that heaven such as the one anticipated by “true believers” does not exist. That your Plains Indians heroes and the armies that killed them do not reside on…
Rooms To Let
Maybe not 50 cents. (For those of you who remember Roger Miller’s “King of the Road.”) But for sure within my budget. Ada Keifer’s red brick Civil War-era house sat at the crook of Baltimore…
Antiquated
This little vignette will make no sense unless you remember a time when most houses had just one or two phones, tethered firmly to a wall. When calls occurred more for arrangements than chats. When…