These days I’m in the process of dusting books and cleaning shelves — it’s spring-cleaning time in the library. Along with it arrives this thought: What if I were to lose all three thousand books in a fire, and what if that same fire destroyed our collection of irreplaceable family photographs and other treasured heirlooms and odds and ends? At one time, the thought that followed would have surprised me. […]
I think of Joe, our cat, who, in the years before he died of old age in 2015, would sit in peace behind the house and look off into space as he listened to the birds and the squirrels making their rounds. Finally, after a very short illness, which of course was no illness at all, death took hold of him and shook him from head to tail, and wrung […]
Any day now, our ninety-year-old neighbor on hospice will take his last breath; and any day now, the young couple who live across the street will become parents of their first child. Knowing this, it would be arrogance on my part to be in any way dissatisfied with my own circumstances, or even particularly pleased. For one thing, I could die before either of the events take place. For another, […]
It rained a little during the night — not much, but enough to lighten, maybe even leaven the air, as if the clouds, instead of moving in from the west, arrived from the yeast. Either way, the crust has been dampened, and life is more than a cabaret, it’s a boulangerie. In all but two bedrooms, I dusted and mopped our new floor, which, save for a speck here and […]
If I fear death, then of course I fear life, because life and death can’t be separated: they’re mutually dependent, present in every process, inextricably intertwined. For proof, I need look no further than my body, where life and death are happening every minute of every day — not as a battle between the two, but in a movement so beautifully efficient and harmonious that it makes them, in terms […]
What they suffered, they suffered together. Material wealth was never their concern, their poverty being the inherited kind. Yet kindness is their inheritance. It’s been said that they died the same day, within hours of each other, their shared dream having run its course. There were children, one of whom, we are told, made these sketches of her parents when they were both very old, using a piece of charcoal […]
Aye, there’s the rub. For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause. When in doubt, quote Shakespeare. And when you’re not in doubt, quote yourself, that others may doubt you — not that they deserve the chance, but it will make them feel better after having had yet another rough night’s sleep. Because the truth is, […]
I can write about the poem, I can write about myself, or I can write about my mother; but it’s plain to see I can’t write about one, without writing about the others, which is why I wrote the poem in the first place — that, and the simple fact that on that day in 2018, it was her birthday, the fifth we marked since her passing. I did, in […]
My father died in 1995, yet I know him a little better each year, one quiet revelation at a time. This is a way of saying I know myself better, for the former cannot happen without the latter. How well he knew himself, though, I wouldn’t presume to judge, for he has surprised me many times, and will likely go on surprising me as long as my memory holds. It’s […]
Nigh on seven years, and the mossy fern garden is still there, crowded with natives that can be found all over our area; we see them when we’re hiking at Silver Falls, where, season upon season, they live and die for each other in a freedom most of us are afraid to imagine for ourselves. There is not one inch of this earth, if left free of our meddling, that […]
William Michaelian 