My family is enormously lucky because we live in a place that is green, and beautiful. Our house is surrounded by trees.

We’ve been in this house for 30 years. That seems so hard to believe. My husband Paul and I raised our three kids here. We’ve had two cats and five dogs at different times in this house.

Parts of the yard have been, at various times over the years, a baseball diamond, a hockey rink, a vegetable garden, a flower bed, a strawberry patch and a place to put the swings.

Now the kids are all grown up and on their own, and it’s time for us to start looking forward. In another ten or so years, we plan to sell this house and move someplace with less upkeep. It’s time.

With that thought in mind, we’re hiring someone to help clean up this huge yard and make…

Every Wind

Every wind loses itself,
no matter where

it starts. I want
a little piece of you.

No.

I want your atmosphere
bundled in a small rice paper packet
and labeled with strings of new rain
and stepping stones.

I want
the grace of silence
blowing in through the cracked
window, disturbing only
the shadows.

Everywhere I go, bits of me linger,
searching for you.

Grief ages one thread at a time,

lurking like an odor
among the lost
things,

or your breath,
still out there,

drifting.

* * *

Music: “Gymnopedie No. 1” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

“Every Wind” first appeared in The Lake in July 2016, and is included in my chapbook, From Every Moment a Second, available for order via Amazon.com and Finishing Line Press.

Last Saturday, one day prior to St. Patrick’s Day, I was itching to stretch my legs. The skies were clear, the temperature tolerable, and my schedule was open. A walk was in order. Where, though? My ultra-hilly suburban neighborhood? Nah. I’d made the rounds there on foot a few days earlier, huffing and puffing my ass off as I scaled the slopes. Yo, there’s a limit to the number of hills this old boy is going to attempt to conquer during any given week, you dig?

Anyway, I was in the mood for some liveliness. And because my area is not blessed with lively as its middle name, I decided to do what I’ve done a ton of times before: Board a train in my little town and allow it to transport me to the mostly flat City Of Brotherly Love. I stepped into the choo-choo at about 10:40 AM…

There is never enough time to explore everything on our travels. There are always intriguing buildings, signs and churches that we say we really must explore at some point… and never get the chance to see. So, if I get the chance at any point, I will try to rectify that. One grey day between Christmas and New Year, when I had a little time to spare, I took the car out to explore some of the lanes and villages that criss-cross ‘our’ patch in Derbyshire.

The village of Elton is one we have driven through on more occasions than we could count. We have passed through there every time we have visited the prehistoric landscape around Robin Hood’s Stride, Cratcliffe Tor and the Nine Stones Close stone circle…and we had never stopped to explore. Yet, Elton is an old village, mentioned in the Domesday Book of 1086…

Margery Kempe was a bloody-minded woman, living in a time when England was still Catholic. Bishops, priests and friars held worldly and spiritual power.

bloody-minded: Chiefly Brit. Perverse, contrary; cantankerous; stubbornly intransigent or obstructive. Cf. bloody adj. OED

She came from the provinces, had no education and bore 14 children to a husband socially beneath her. I feel for the poor man—read on and see.

I do enjoy reading novels with strong mystical content. Especially when, as is the case with Grasping at Water, the author has profound knowledge of her subject.

About Grasping at Water

When a young, unidentified woman is pulled alive and well from Sydney Harbour in 2013, the connections to another woman – found in similar circumstances forty years earlier – present psychiatrist Kathryn Brookley with a terrible decision as the events of the present and past begin to mirror each other and the gap between truth and illusion shrinks.

When the young woman goes further and declares that she has lived continuously since coming to ‘understanding’ in the 14th century, her vivid accounts of life, love, childbirth, and loss in the Middle Ages seem so authentic that they test Kathryn’s scientific objectivity to the limit. As Kathryn delves she discovers that she is not the only one whose habitual…