Celebrating a Life for the Senses
The enticing aroma of ripe, fresh strawberries scents the air. It is a bright spring morning and I have walked from my writer’s cottage in Carmel-by-the-Sea to the weekly farmer’s market. The gathering of vendors is a modest affair, perhaps a dozen tables, the market significantly smaller now that the City exiled it from the…
The growl emerges somewhere at the back of my throat, a shaggy bear lurking in the shadows of a damp, darkened cave. I continue to summon the sound, pushing it forward with breath and support from my respiratory diaphragm, and like a fire fed with fuel and oxygen, it grows quickly in both intensity and…
I’ve been traveling too much lately, feeling unsettled. As we in the northern hemisphere draw near to the vernal equinox, when day and night are in equal measure and we commonly acknowledge that spring begins, it feels that my year has thus far been largely about movement and change. I have recently joked to a…
Her death was unexpected. At eighty-four, though somewhat stooped from the hump of her back and moving more slowly than in years previous, my father’s older sister was still sharp, spritely, and feisty as ever. Two weeks ago, a fall shattered her leg and landed her in the hospital, where she contracted pneumonia and died…