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2009 In The Rear-View Mirror
A year ago I had just moved from a country that didn’t want me to a bare echoey white place hidden under a stifling canopy of tall dark trees. I adore trees, and loved lying in bed looking at green branches, but the bare echoey place had an inner emptiness that rang loudly in my ears. Plus it had weird carpet. In the spring I discovered forested trails and alternate universes. I sat, motionless, sometimes for hours, staring out through a skylight and eventually emerging into a giddy, childlike state, a person who thought lakes were oceans and wondered whether she should be driving real cars. A year ago I…
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Ordinary
Yesterday we went for a walk. It was raining a little and I put my hood up to cover my hair, missing my favorite black beret that disappeared last week into The Land of Misfit Hats when the mighty wind blew and trees toppled. We wove our way through art galleries. I admired some pieces and took away new inspiration. There was nothing that needed to be bought, not even the beautifully-colored large glass octopus that called to me from its waterless perch. I turned my eyes quickly away from a young woman’s impossibly large nose, even though she is probably accustomed to nasal scrutiny. A plate of untouched and…
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Forest Love Song
It started two years ago (or was it two millennia?). I rented a wee dollhouse in the forest space high above the rock-strewn beach of Pt. Roberts, WA, a tiny peninsula that juts from Canada into Boundary Bay and that because of oversight or a mapmaker’s joke actually belongs to the U.S., requiring border crossings and passports. My dollhouse-in-the-woods was to be the perfect writers’ retreat — difficult to get to, remote, quiet. I could overlook the tiny bathroom/shower combination, sit on the wee sofa built for two, and write. I found myself drawn outside, though. Late-season blackberries still dotted the tangled vines marking the steep trail down to the…
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Home
I have a home again. At least, I left a deposit check and a lot of information about myself, and it’s my hope that it will mean picking up keys in a couple of weeks and then trying valiantly to fill a space that I already know is too big, but what the hell? Shopping for places to live has consumed me for weeks. Several times a day I’d comb through the offerings on Craigslist, looking for treasure. The perfect place, summed up in a paragraph and, if I was lucky, a couple of blurry photos. I hunted down property management companies and sifted through their inventory. I saw, after…