I haven’t written much here lately. I don’t have a really good reason, other than the THOUGHT of writing a POST has gotten so HUGE-NORMOUS in my mind, that I actually get terrified and just run away. However. Yesterday, my friend Chris posted a link to Hyperbole and a Half’s latest post “Depression Part 2.” This…
On Having to Cut Down a Tree
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Is it worth being sentimental over one tree? The last time I mentioned to friends that we might have to cut down our two huge Norway maples, one FB friend replied “good riddance. They are invasive species to New England anyway.” I sometimes think that our attachments to trees or cars or other “stuff” isn’t…
Cargo Pants, Packing Lists, and the Pothole of Despair
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My house is full of crap. Our world is full of crap. Today at the store, the cashier and the customers ahead and behind me and I were all talking about back-to-school sales. Old Navy-this and sales tax free week-that. The kind of mindless conversation we humans love to have. I suppose $5 cargo pants…
What We Did in Summer
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My memory of my youth is a haze of fine particulate.I don’t remember what I did in the summer as a kid. Not specifically. I remember that I played outside with the neighbor kids and my siblings. We rode bikes and ran around. I went on vacation with my family. There was the library and…
Our Memories Become Theirs
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At the beginning of my parenting experience, I said “no” often. The noise and the mess was a lot to handle. Not to mention the plain issue of just keeping track of where all the little live bodies were in space and time. And what they were planning to put in their mouth at that…
Without Remembering
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Another sunrise, another lifeCreating is not remembering… It is to look and to hear and to write — without remembering. It is the immediate feelings arranged in words as they occur to me.” — Gertrude Stein We are all in our ruts, our patterns, our habits. It’s a relief, I suppose, to discover they are…
Probably the Greatest Book List Ever for Elementary Kids
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A friend of mine posted a question of Facebook asking: Those of you who were elementary schoolers in the late 70s and 80s: Could you please share a few books that you read then that meant a lot to you? Or that you just super loved? I responded right away without thinking. The “Little House”…
Ordinary Rockstar (Scintilla Redux)
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Today’s Scintilla prompt… Talk about a time when you were driving and you sang in the car, all alone. Why do you remember this song and that stretch of road? sent me back immediately to a moment in time, October 2010. I was in the middle of two major and intersecting life renovations. Both of…
How I Made Friends in London (Without Really Knowing How I Did It)
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Moving to England? Concerned about being lonely and ostracized due to your homeland’s generalized ignorance, poor eating habits, and moronically Machiavellian leadership? DON’T WORRY! It’s simple! Just follow these easy, tried-and-true steps! Study important films from your host country to create an understanding of what ALL the people in that country will be like before you go.…
Scintilla13: I’m Not as Think as…
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Priests have drank wine in front of me since I was a baby. When I needed a tooth pulled, dad numbed my gums with whiskey. My dad taught me how to refresh his 7&7 when I was not much older than seven. This was during my parents wild “card” parties where couples came over and…
The Night Before Scintilla
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I admit it: when it comes to Twitter writing projects, I am such a sucker. Well, that assumes of course that getting myself tangled up with an online community of like-minded thinkers and writers (99 percent of whom I have never met!) makes me a sucker. Yes, please. I’ll take another lick of that. So…
I Submit to You This Broken Heart
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I submit to you this broken heart. A year ago, I (unintentionally!) kicked a little snowball down a snowy hill, and I discovered how cold and mean life can be. I am awfully terrible at telling personal stories, and since this story has intertwined a few other hearts of people I love, I am not…
On Going Mental
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Yesterday one of my oldest friends called me… from the “inside.” Well, to put it more clearly, she called from an inpatient psych ward. My friend and I have known each other now as long as we have not known each other… longer actually. And since she met her husband about 3 weeks after I…
Heading into a ‘Month of Letters’
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I am fully aware that it is a bit ironic that I write a BLOG with the word “letters” in the title. Is it a misnomer? Maybe… Originally my blog was “Letters from London (and Elsewhere)” and it was really just a way for me to — en masse — “post” to a bunch of…
11 Minutes is alot of Time
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Today is wrote a small stone called “The Time.” I wrote it for two reasons. First, because I notice I had about 11 minutes before the kids had to leave to go to school. The kids were happily engaged in something and I suddenly thought: “Hey! I should write my small stone right now, while…
