A number of years ago—maybe eight or nine now! 2014?—I entertained myself greatly with a poetry book project I called Miss Scarlet in the Library with a Rope, a celebration of the wonder that is the book. This collection grew to become a gathering of poems whose predominant constraint is that they were all “prompted” by book titles from prose authors I had loved and read voraciously over the years
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End of the Season…
There is a spectacularly bright full moon out there on this chilly, late November night. Yesterday, I cut the final dahlias blooms of the season. They were looking a little ragged after a few nights of just-around-freezing temperatures and cold wind. Then I tackled the plants with my new, awesome Felco secateurs—they made swift work of stems and stalks
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Studying the Masters
When you are someone who writes or aspires to write, I think reading means not just enjoyment but also study. It means seeking to understand all the nuts and bolts about the way a piece of writing is put together and then ticks…
The Last Bouquet?
There was a frost last week in and around the Northeast Portland neighborhood where we live, a couple of miles up the hill from the Columbia River. But somehow the dahlias survived here in our micro-climate that only got to a low of 33 degrees F. I walked by other gardens where their dahlia leaves are now blackened, their unspent blooms still knobby and unopened on their stems…
B-I-N-G-O!
Often the wisdom arrives in the simplest of packages and seems like it was there (and obvious) all along
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The Sky Tonight
Getting ready all day yesterday and today for the arrival of family including young grandchildren early tomorrow. Getting ready means laundry
Leave the Leaves
Our garden helper, Phil, was here today, pruning the vine maples, the Japanese maples, the witch hazel, the redbud
Every Picture Tells A Story
I am not a natural with all this digital photography. I generally like/prefer/privilege physical media—paper books, LPs, CDs, DVDs, printed photographs. But hell, the damn iPhone camera is (even when it is not the latest version) an awesome tool and I use it regularly and widely to record my adventures rambling through the days called living this life…
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Some days are just dazzling…
And even the mottled, somewhat raggedy witch hazel leaves become a yellow luminescence against the afternoon and its celebration of sky-blue sky. A day to walk, observe, look up, celebrate the riot of color of the so many neighborhood shrubs and trees. A day to rake more fallen browning leaves, to sweep, to wait for the finches and bushtits to arrive for their before dinner dip
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Our 21st Century Victory Garden
The rains have pretty much arrived here in Western Oregon. And we are in the final stages of putting most of our 400-square foot plot at the Woodlawn Community Garden to bed. Oh, there will be stuff growing over the winter like always—…