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Finding Voice

April 9, 2025

I’ve read, When Women Were Birds, by Terry Tempest Williams, several times. In the book she tells how she inherited her mother’s journals and found every page in every journal blank. To me, that emptiness speaks volumes. One reading of the book, several years ago, compelled me to create the posted painting; but I found no words to go with the painting until now.

Finding Voice

Where do they come from, the stories,
and before them the words,
that tell us how to live
in an uncertain world?

Do they lie fallow
in ancestral myths
rumbling in hearts
pulsing in minds
waiting for the quieted throat
to find voice?

Are they buried
in ancestral memories
darkened, silent,
waiting for light
to strengthen and grow,
to find life?

Where do they come from, the stories
and before them the words
that tell us how to live
in an uncertain world?

I say:
they come from us
blank pages are waiting


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Simple Splendor

March 12, 2025

Simple Splendor

It was a car stopping sight. The field, mainly low green grass; the distant sky a surround of pink and blue; and near the road a small section of weathered wattle fencing supporting a small, vibrant patch of sunflowers, swaying gold, orange and buttery yellow; their heads too heavy to hold still, in the light summer breeze. Was this really just a country road, somewhere in rural Georgia, or had I time traveled to the South of France?

I left the car and walked nearer to the sunflowers; silence broken only by the occasional bird song and the crunch of gravel beneath my feet. I was tempted to touch the smooth leaves, prickly centers and stems. Tempted to cut and gather the flowers into a bouquet, to take home with me and hold captive in a clear vase filled with cool water. Instead, I admired this burst of surprising beauty in an otherwise unassuming pastoral setting and left the sunflowers rooted in the earth so they might share their simple splendor with other wanderers.


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February

February 12, 2025

February

A short month, halfway between
winter solstice and spring equinox,
this month of hearts and flowers
hints of verdant spring,
promises an end to mousy winter.
Birds chirp,
sun warms,
no ice on water now,
no frost to kill delicate buds.
Day lengthens,
opens and closes with vibrant skies.
Night shortens,
heaven glows with planets and stars.
In February
this short month, halfway between
winter solstice and spring equinox,
the year is young, almost new,
and optimism abides.


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Finding Negative Space

January 15, 2025

This essay came about when I could not find the time to rework the painting linked to the essay. All I wanted to do was add more negative space by covering over a portion of the marsh in the right bottom corner of the canvas. Yet “all I wanted to do” seemed impossible because other aspects of life kept interfering. My life, just like my painting, needed more negative space. I gave the painting what it needed; and resolved to do the same to my life.

Finding Negative Space: Not A Resolution Just a Way of Being in 2025

Negative space is not, as it sounds, gloomy and pessimistic. In art, negative space is very positive, defining subjects and providing visual balance. Technically negative space is empty space but empty, as used here, does not mean insignificant or unimportant. Negative space unifies a composition’s disparate parts and helps the viewer make sense of the composition. The viewer’s eyes find a place to rest in negative space.

I experience the pleasure of negative space every year when I clear away holiday decorations. When the tangible is removed, I am greeted with a new view and my home seems more spacious and restful. Air and lightness fill what is otherwise an empty, but significant, space.

This year I plan to use the idea of negative space to define what is essential and find balance in my life. When the extraneous bits fall away, I won’t gain any more time, and I may even have to attend to some of the culled pieces at a later date, but in the immediate I’ll feel, and be able to breathe, easier. I’ll invite the air and lightness in and put away, even for a time, what feels out of place.

Maybe the artful concept of negative space will help me live more artfully this year; and maybe with perseverance, finding negative space in my life will become not a resolution for the new year, it will become a way of being in 2025.


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We Brought Bear Home for Christmas

December 11, 2024

We Brought Bear Home for Christmas

Tug, our family dog, died during the summer of 2023. She was twenty years old. We grieved for her; we missed her; and once we felt ready, we started searching shelter and rescue websites for another small adult female dog to adopt. Success eluded us until my husband found a picture of Reba, on the South Georgia Equine Rescue website. She looked soulful and sweet with the face, and fur color, of a little fox. She seemed absolutely perfect! Except for her name.

Her story goes like this: Reba (named by the rescue staff, in an obvious nod to her ginger colored fur) was found running in the “wilds of Waynesville, Georgia” with a rough and tumble pack. Estimated to be two years old, she was in heat, and had to be isolated from all the other dogs. She would be spayed, but not until her bleeding stopped. On December 4th, 2023 we were approved for adoption; but Reba would live at the rescue until her spaying in early January, 2024. Ok, we are patient people. We could wait. This also gave us time to plan for our new pet and to decide on a different name for her.

Then on December 8th, 2023 we got a rather frantic call from Heather who runs this rescue, asking us if we could take Reba home sooner. Several additional small dogs had been brought in making it harder to keep Reba separated. Without question we said yes and agreed to pick her up the following day; promising (crossing our hearts and hoping to die promising) to comply with the scheduled spaying in January. So with one day to prepare to welcome a dog in heat into our home, we not only made sure we had some of the basics like food, a collar, and a leash, we also decked our halls and beds and chairs with old linens. We had still not decided on a new name. We considered waiting to meet Reba to see if a new name was obvious; or maybe we should do what my clever daughter suggested and just rearrange the letters that spell Reba into something else. That something else my daughter had figured out was, Bear.

After a long ride, on a sunny and warm December 9th, 2023, we turned off the highway onto a rutted dirt road and drove to the rescue’s location. The property was fully fenced in and had a chained utility gate. Our arrival was ignored by the horses inside the fence but a pack of barking dogs charged to the fenced boundary. The racket they made left no doubt strangers had arrived. As planned, we phoned Heather and after several minutes a woman emerged from a trailer across the field carrying a small dog. As they got closer, I could see the dog was calm but looked wary, not nervous, just fearful. Maybe some of that was because the yard dogs had lost interest in us and ran to the woman, surrounding her and the dog in her arms, while continuing their shenanigans with noise and gusto. Or maybe it had more to do with all the recent disruptions and changes life had sent Reba’s way.

The woman made introductions,”I’m Heather and this is Reba”. Heather handed the dog over the locked gate to my husband along with some medicinal items in a plastic bag and just a few instructions. I noticed Reba’s small frame swam in the harness she wore, her fur was visibly soiled, matted to her tucked in tail and she smelled musty. We learned about her protruding sternum which complicates picking her up and what treatments for parasites she had already received. The meet and greet was short mainly because we did not have many questions. So we thanked Heather and left. In the car, Reba sat with me for the long ride home which at some point included a lap load of doggy vomit. We loved her already.

At first Paul and l were quiet in the car. Then Paul asked “Well what do you think?” “I think she needs a bath”, I replied. “I know, but what do you think we should name her?” he questioned; then without skipping a beat declared “I like the name, Bear”.

I looked down at the small bundle of ungroomed potential on my lap and saw how funny yet appropriate that name would be. She had endured living in tough circumstances. While we might never know exactly how tough those circumstances were, I knew this dog was a survivor and deserved a name honoring that quality. Bear is that kind of name. It symbolizes courage and power. So I agreed with Paul. We named her Bear.

We retired the name Reba. Relegated it to a past life, a hard life, a life where no one cared for or comforted this dog. That life ended when we brought Bear home with us for Christmas to live in her forever home. Bear’s life is easier now and we only mention Reba, if asked, “How did you name that little dog, Bear?”


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One Long Ago Moment in Rhode Island

November 18, 2024

One Long Ago Moment in Rhode Island

We walked through fog
to water nudging the land’s edge.
Across the cove
one resonant goose calls.
Nearer to shore
one soaring gull caws.
We are silent.

Gray surrounds us,
sky, water, rocks, birds, and sand,
a somber color
breached only by the scarlet flush of her wool coat
its black velvet color soft against her delicate skin.
One tiny hand warms in mine,
one clutches the corner of a loved-worn blanket.
She leans into my side.
We are silent.

Only the restless water sighs.


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After Helene

October 9, 2024

After Helene

I am sifting through thoughts and feelings like pulling fingers through cloudy water. There is no clarity, just glimpses of memories and ideas. The aftermath of hurricane Helene has muddled my thinking; making what I want to say a thick sludge, almost impossible to share. Water. It is drowning my lucidity.

My younger sister lives with her wife in Fairview, North Carolina. Together, they have built a beautiful life. A comfortable patinaed life rich with books and art and dogs, friends and a lake house, flowers and birds. These two are generous. They share their blessings thoughtfully, with grace and humility.

Earlier this past year, I stayed at their Lake Lure house with my husband and our dog; we visited the Fairview homestead. Meals were taken together. We used our time to wander through Chimney Rock and Asheville; nearby places that helped sculpt the eclectic ambiance in this very American place.

Hurricane Helene has forever changed this landscape. Chimney Rock is gone, washed away by flood waters as muddy as my thoughts. Asheville, that old and majestic city, I once thought invincible, is mortally wounded. Lake Lure’s aqueous expanse is almost solid, congested and clogged with the remnants of so much loss- docks and homes and boats, and trees, so many trees. What is salvageable amidst this devastation? Resilience is needed to rebuild; and rebuilding requires the resilient to remain in place, staking their claims again, looking past the destruction in order to create….what? What was there, what they had, or do they relinquish what was, choosing what can be? Those questions are too big for me to answer, burdened as I am with muddled thinking.

These catastrophic, uninvited tragedies would be inconceivable if they were not real. But they are real and they are very, very ugly. My emotions bobble all over the place but two surface again and again, sadness and thankfulness. I feel sad for all that was lost but more importantly I feel thankful for all that was not lost. My loved ones in North Carolina are alive. They survived. I will remind myself of that again and again because only those we love are irreplaceable treasures. Perhaps that is all the clarity I need. In any case it is all I have now.

(The companion painting to this written piece is an abstract mixed media acrylic that I painted in response to the condition of Lake Lure after the ferocity of hurricane Helene.)


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This is September

September 16, 2024

This is September

“All the months are crude experiments out of which the perfect September is made.” Virginia Woolf

Light shifts,
air dries,
pigments intensify and
paint the day-sky bluer, brighter,
flame the evening-sky copper and gold,
ink the night-sky indigo
where moon and stars glow cold-white.

Nature changes,
slowly,
replacing greens
with scarlet, rust, maroon, and orange,
leisurely, tinting the tips and edges of
leaves and grasses
gourds and apples and pears.

Crisp mornings refresh
inspire deep breathing,
beach walking, balance, renewal,
a time for transitions when
the fall equinox positions us between
summer’s fertile abundance and
winter’s barren reach.

This is September.


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Old Southern Oak

August 2, 2024

Old Southern Oak

Only the trunk,
guillotined long ago,
remains.

From the trunk,
one limb, bends awkwardly, angles sharply,
skims the ground
like a bone, healed badly and needing support.

From the limb
one branch nurtures a smattering of green leaves
and stretches to touch the blue sky
in one optimistic gesture.

Seeking the future,
defying inevitable demise,
declaring,
I live.


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A Gardener’s Musings in Coastal Georgia

June 26, 2024

A Gardener’s Musings in Coastal Georgia

Is this spring; air sun-scorched and swollen, wet?
In this deep Southern climate
spiny cacti and spiky sago palms
thrive even with benign neglect,
but delicate flora
sea-blue hydrangeas and sunset-pink impatiens wilt,
thirst for daily attention.

Bird baths need cleaning and filling,
little pools to slake a songbird’s dry tongue
and cool its tiny body.

I weed and water, prune and pamper
gladly doing the work of the optimist
because she who gardens
must be an optimist:
one who believes
weeds will be conquered and
empty space will fill with fruit and flowers
in beautiful abundance.

With joy, the gardener soothes her aches
and cools an occasional sunburn,
small prices to pay
for the pleasure of digging dirt
in sweat soaked clothes,
trusting that growth is possible
and rain will wet the earth
if not today then tomorrow.

Tomorrow.
That is what a gardener grows.


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