I haven’t written for the last few days because we have been traveling. Wednesday night, after our Service of Reflection and Remembrance, Ginger and I loaded up a rented van with some furniture, pictures, and household goods we had packed in the barn and began driving to Durham, North Carolina (in New England, you have…
The book I started on my ride to New York this morning was Unpacking the Boxes: A Memoir of a Life in Poetry by Donald Hall. A couple of pages in, I found this sentence: Their house was always dark: it felt like held breath. (5) The sentence stayed with me. When I sat down…
I’m seventy minutes away from the end of my sixtieth year, as I sit down to write, and I have a confession to make: I am not a mathematician. I did, however, just stumble upon something as I was trying to figure out what words to use to close out this decade and begin the…
The fact that Ginger and I have been in Guilford a little over a year now means we are beginning to do things for the second time; our inaugural year is over. Last year I was invited to serve on the Christmas Tree Committee, which, I learned, meets only once a year on the second…
My plan for this evening was to write my blog post. Ginger was finishing her sermon for Sunday. The two of us were at a coffee shop in Branford, the town next to us. About seven, she said she was hungry and suggested we pick up a gift certificate we had at home for a…
During the course of the day, this video showed up in the feed of a Facebook friend who lives in California. If you don’t want to take time to watch the video, it is a promo for a new store Amazon is opening in Seattle in January called Amazon Go that allows you to shop…
In my job as an editor, some days are big picture days and some days are detail days. Today was the latter. I spent most of it making sure certain words were where they were supposed to be, page after page. It’s not the most glamorous work, but one of the reasons I know I’m…
I could blame it on somebody, but I’ll just fess up instead: I’ve watched my share of Hallmark Christmas movies. Though I love a good character-driven, emotional landslide where nothing much happens other than profound sadness, I get hooked waiting for the two people to figure out they were meant for each other and go…
Today was one of those days that didn’t have much on the schedule going into it, and yet was filled with unexpected moments I felt I had prepared for, somehow, which sent me back to a fragment of a poem I had hung on to, which I ended up finishing this way. Mis en place is…
“This is Us” A Sermon for First Congregational Church of Guilford, UCC Matthew 11:2-11 December 4, 2016 Back in my days as a high school English teacher, one of my favorite essay questions was to ask them to describe their favorite sidekick in literature. You know what I mean: the one who is always there…