Apostrophe Blog Archive Archives

The Last Bouquet

Nancy Flynn January 17, 2025Apostrophe Blog Archive, Gardening, History Lessons, Photography, Political News, Writing

I picked the last batch of dahlias on November 22nd, seventeen days after the disastrous, shameful results in the U.S. presidential election. It had been a relatively warm fall overall and the dahlias just kept on blooming right up until the day when it was time to cut down the stalks, cover the beds with thick plastic, shovel then rake a thick layer of bark mulch on top—their over-wintering insulation so I did not have to dig up all the tubers and put them into crates full of peat moss and newspaper for storage…

Get Your 25-cent Poetry Here…

Nancy Flynn January 16, 2025Apostrophe Blog Archive, Neighborhood, Publication News, Writing

There is a very cool coffeehouse called The Stacks two miles from our house down Killingsworth Street. It not only serves coffee and breakfast burritos but is also a very cool community library. I met friends at The Stacks for coffee and conversation a few days ago. All around us sat (mostly) silent people with their varied incarnations of coffee drinks. Nearly all were either wearing headphones or staring into one screen or another
…

Friday Afternoon Landscape

Nancy Flynn January 10, 2025Apostrophe Blog Archive, Musings, Writing

The morning started in fog. Then a slow-to-emerge sun began to take over the day so we headed to the happy place that is Cistus Nursery on Sauvie Island a dozen or so miles out of town to look for a few more native licorice ferns—specifically the Polypodium glycyrrhiza ‘Rowdy Creek’ that the Cistus folks found growing on a stony cliff in the Redwood Belt right on the Curry County/Del Norte County line of Oregon/California. I have two already and they are thriving in our front yard shady garden…

Turning Away from (Anti-) Social Media…

Nancy Flynn January 8, 2025Apostrophe Blog Archive, History Lessons, Musings, Political News

Well, the time has finally come for me. I am done. I can no longer pretend these social media platforms are harmless, are working for the overall greater good. I can no longer engage, participate, abide even though I know these sites have been good for many communities particularly writers and artists. The latest news that the CEO of the companies under the umbrella of the (very silly) company name Meta will end its fact-checking program in favor of a community-based system to determine veracity and truth is the final straw for me…

The Promise of Spring

Nancy Flynn January 7, 2025Apostrophe Blog Archive, Gardening, Musings

The red twig dogwood, Cornus sericea, in our backyard habitat is early to bloom this year. I have to wonder if it is because Phil, …

Celebrating This Website’s China Anniversary

Nancy Flynn January 4, 2025Apostrophe Blog Archive, Writing

It boggles the mind, my mind, that it has been twenty years! since I first launched this website, www.nancyflynn.com, with the graphic design wizardry of my dear friend, Cynthia Frazier-Rogers. In 2004—when W. Bush was the President, when we were mired in that tragic folly of the Iraq war, when I was still in my freaking forties!—I remember regularly monitoring the ICANN domain name registry. I was waiting to pounce on and (hopefully) reclaim the .com version of my name…

Tangling Up in Blue

Nancy Flynn January 3, 2025Apostrophe Blog Archive, Musings, Neighborhood

After days of bleak—gray, cold, wet, chill, puddles, sodden earth, wet shoes, dashing quickly from car to the side door of the house between falling drops—in the continuing interregnum, the between, the still-between—blue skies emerged on a Friday afternoon, this third day of January in the preposterous, future-sounding year of 2025. Yesterday, on its half-century anniversary since being released, I listened to the Bob Dylan album, Tangled Up in Blue, one that more than a few over the years have described as his masterpiece…

The Scattering and the Shadows

Nancy Flynn December 31, 2024Apostrophe Blog Archive, Musings, Political News, Wisdom

I took this photo a few days after the terrible, shameful outcome of the November Presidential election here in the U.S. Those were the days when it felt like I was walking around in a world I finally had to admit existed, one that I do not feel I belong to, a land of cruelty and anger, a population of the aggrieved and the inflamed. No longer was there the stable and reliable world I would prefer to inhabit; everything now felt flung apart, flung down, spent. And so many of us isolated and far far apart. It was a beautiful autumn here in Portland, Oregon. Many days were sunny even verging into warmth…

Publication News: “Inventory”

Nancy Flynn December 26, 2024Apostrophe Blog Archive, Publication News, Writing

Sometime a poem can emerge from something as mundane as the cleaning out of a cluttered desk drawer. Cataloguing the objects found, remembering the reason why (if any) a particular item—a ticket stub, a stray button, a silver-dollar coin from the 1890s—got stashed away, somehow deserving to be saved. How to then build a poem from a group of seemingly unrelated objects? What through-line could work to ties such disparities together into a kind of whole?…

Life Going By in a Blur…

Nancy Flynn December 17, 2024Apostrophe Blog Archive, Musings

It rains. It pours. The atmosphere is currently a torrent pummeling down. All the world is wet, cold, muddied, gray, puddle and flow. The sky, a wash of white—no texture, no definition, one mass of socked-in cloud. That is the general feeling these last few days of autumn as we edge to the solstice, the shorter daylight day of the year, here in the Pacific Northwest…

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