Picking up a few wind-downed birch and fir branches, I found out just how soggy the backyard is. Each step was accompanied by a luscious squish — two words you don’t see together very often — the result of the frequent rains we’ve been having. This didn’t stop me, though, from making a fair beginning of the annual pruning of our fig tree, which is a fair-sized job requiring the […]
Well, that’s enough about ants, or whatever it is I was writing about. And anyway, we can be glad they’re not cockroaches. Yet I remember my father’s uncles and aunts using the term cockroach endearingly, with a smile that also signified ample affection for the nephew they’d known from birth and watched grow up on their sister and brother-in-law’s Depression-era farm — the sister and brother-in-law being my father’s parents: […]
The first thing to remember is that the ants were here before we were. The house we live in was built on top of their house. That they find their way inside during the winter is inevitable, as they seek warmth, moisture, and food. This does not make them invaders or enemies. And so to treat them as such is an unenlightened response that mimics American history in particular, and […]
On the last day of the year, in a used bookstore we visit every so often in West Salem, I chanced upon an unread copy of a Library of America edition containing three works by Herman Melville, all having to do with the sea: Typee; Omoo; and Mardi. Priced at only eight dollars and fifty cents, the book was still in its original white slipcase, and its ribbon marker had […]
A great cry at the bottom of the hill. An owl: Are you here still? And up I go, knowing full well An answer would prove nothing at all. ~ [ 2040 ]
A wild, windy morning. Rain and fir cones pelt the house. The stove light flickers — once, twice, three times; four. Candle and matches on the counter, just in case. Then the wind stops and everything is quiet, As if a grand, cosmic decision has been made. To open palms, to sit up straight, and blow away. ~ [ 2039 ]
The rain stopped just before my run, and, for most of the time I was out, there was a hazy window in the clouds that allowed me to see the full moon. The moon is always a good running companion, and perhaps its appearance was what stirred the coyotes in the nearby wetland to howl. It sounded like there were two of them. But their cries didn’t last long. And […]
Every winter, I think about rearranging the more than three thousand books and two dozen bookshelves in this room. But other than minor changes — a stack here, a stack there — it ends up staying the way it is: familiar, visually pleasing, organized according to no specific plan other than a theme or author here and there, or a type of binding. If I’m counting correctly, I acquired forty-two […]
Not far into this morning’s run, from about two houses away, I startled a pair of coyotes, which saw me before I saw them and dashed off through a neighbor’s front yard and around the corner out of sight. Had they come my way instead, they would have been immediately upon me, and I could have told them that I wasn’t one of those setting off fireworks most of the […]
As funny as it seems, I was once a chubby cherub, a 1950s Raphael, who weighed thirty pounds at a year. There’s a picture in our sitting room that proves it, a smiling baby of nine months propped up by his own sweet girth, rolls at his wrists, and a twinkling smile. No wings — they never quite developed. There was only a minor scapular deformity, or perhaps conformity, to […]
William Michaelian 