Sunday stroll…

All the windows of my heart I open to the day.

~ John Greenleaf Whitter ~

I thought, given that yesterday was the one year anniversary of Carry It Forward, that I’d do a Sunday stroll of my favorite photos of the year. It became clear, quite quickly, that it would turn into more of a marathon than a stroll, so I decided to narrow the field a little. Windows have been a favorite subject for me for as long as I can remember, so here you go – a stroll through twelve months of windows from around the world!

Wyomissing, Pennsylvania

Malaga, Spain

Ronda, Spain

Washington, DC

rural Virginia

New York, New York

view from my window

Washington, DC

Washington, Virginia

Freeport, Maine

Falls Church, Virginia

New Orleans

New Orleans

New Orleans

Somewhere in the sky

Phoenix, Arizona

Ferry from Seattle to Victoria, BC

Carving Shed, The Wick, Tofino, BC

Tofino, BC

The Wick, Tofino, BC – on my fiftieth birthday

Mabel Dodge Luhan House, Taos, New Mexico

Mabel Dodge Luhan House, Taos, New Mexico

window shopping, Calistoga, California

my dining room

Falls Church, Virginia

Green Gulch Farm, Marin County, California

greenhouse at Green Gulch Farm

one of my stories…

One of the things I really enjoyed at the writer’s retreat last month was the readings we did for each other in the evening. We gathered in the log cabin at Mabel Dodge Luhan house, dimmed the lights, swatted the gigantic moths and read our work out loud in turn. It was magical, listening to stories women had been carrying inside them, brought out and shyly shown to each other. I have really been missing Jen Louden and that particular circle of writers and thought maybe I would “read” a little to you today.

This is from a new piece, called “The Ferret”. I’d love to hear your thoughts…

The morning air was still and cool, mist rising just a little off the mountains framing our fields. A single shot rang out, then another. I counted to fifteen slowly – one, one thousand, two, one thousand, three – in the way I had been taught to measure time. Then then were three more small explosions – the sound made only when metal hits metal and gunpowder simultaneously, echoed down the long tubular chamber of a shot gun. I knew that sound, but this morning it wasn’t coming from out there in the fields . This time, it was coming from below me, inside the house – or so it seemed. And given the clang of what could only be pots and pans that followed, I feared I was right. I was sick abed, again, with the first mustard poultice of the day sitting on my chest and I knew better than to move, so I just stayed very still and listened. I went back to my method of telling time, as there was no clock in my room, or anywhere in our home, as far as I knew. There was only Daddy’s pocket watch and I would bet everything I didn’t own that day that that particular watch was awfully close to a gun.

I know the story now, so I’ll tell you what happened that morning. It all started in the main room of the cabin. Mama was cooking, of course. She’d already tended to me and to Grandpappy, who was sitting in his chair, oblivious to all but the stories in his mind. She flew, as much as you could fly in such tight quarters, about the kitchen, rolling out biscuits on the wooden table one minute, stirring coffee into flour browned in bacon fat on the top of the wood stove the next. I smelled the smells, up in my spot under the eaves, but the rest I am filling in from what I have seen most mornings of my life and what I heard and the details I could squeeze out of Miss Patricia as she sat later that evening, brushing out her hair. One hundred strokes, every evening, come you know what or high water. Miss Patricia. She is a story unto herself, she is.

So. Mama was cooking and every once in a while, she’d stop and turn and look at the table, or out the window. “Real suddenly like”, Miss Patricia said. She likes to mix her words between Cove talk and the fancy city terms she has picked up here and there. Me? I try to speak the truth and use proper English and no cussing, as Mama says. Anyway, the only thing that was unusual in all of that was that Mama stopped. She hardly ever stands still. She just doesn’t have time for such nonsense, she says. The rest of the usual suspects (I love mystery books – can’t you tell?) were setting around the table. Mama would like for it to be our dining room table, and that’s what she calls it, but in truth, it is where we do everything. Eating, writing, reading, sewing and drying out church clothes all happens in the same place and there’s nothing wrong with that, of course. When it’s cold out, though, or raining, sometimes the gutting and cleaning goes on there, too. Sometimes the guns are taken apart and put back together on the wooden slats. The worst is when someone dies and the body sits up on the table in its wooden box, so that everyone can walk around it in a circle. Makes me shrink up, just to write that. Last time that happened, I snuck food up to my spot, so I could eat without thinking of death, and got whipped for lying and saying I wasn’t hungry.

Sunday stroll…

I thought, given that these are Sunday strolls, that maybe I would post
some of the many, many religious images from my trip to New Mexico.

It seemed that everywhere I looked, there was a cross, or a bell, or an
intricate mosaic. Here are some of my favorites from Chimayo, Taos
and Santa Fe… you can see the history of the area in them.

Words from the wild west…

What lies below and souls who have gone before us…

Do those souls who came before us lie below us – only? Or are they
above us, too and behind us, propelling us forward, in front of us like
point guards, trying to steer us towards what they believe is best for
us?

Or does each generation of beings form a foundation for those who
come next? Do they almost literally lay themselves down in order to
allow us to be elevated?

This little piece is the result of a two minute exercise, part of the incredible
writer’s retreat I just attended with Jen Louden and thirty exquisitely
bright and beautiful women. In Taos. New Mexico.

I can’t write about it yet, I don’t have the words. My heart is too full.
So I thought I’d start here.

It’s good to be back.