Category: Uncategorized
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Summer’s End
21 September 2024 Does the passage from one season to another account for my mercurial shifts of mood? I wonder. More tired than I’ve any right to be, I blame my fatigue on having been away from home three weekends in a row. As Earth was to Antaeus, Tara to Scarlett O’Hara, Gnawwood is to…
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Leaving / Not Leaving
9 September 2024 The sound that broke through my dream this morning seemed a cross between the coyotes’ eerie roll call I often hear at night and the honking of geese headed south. The dream—of a group effort to set up Christmas trees for an outside display; was one of us Alec Baldwin??—dissipated, slowly replaced…
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Labor Day Weekend Earth Yoga Retreat on Star Island
4 September 2024 The weekend just past was unique in my almost 72 years, decidedly NOT compromised by back-to-school jitters for this retiree now five Labor Days out from having to prepare opening lectures. Instead, I enjoyed the yoga retreat organized by the vastly experienced, world-traveling yogi Kacy Harnedy, with assistance and revelatory Thai massage…
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Time passing
17 August 2024 Today, 17 August 2024, marks the six-months anniversary of my sister Jane’s passing, and this morning I learned that my beloved friend and former colleague, Roberta White, died this morning in Danville, Kentucky, where “Bobbie” was and remained my mentor and model as an accomplished scholar; skilled and beloved Centre College professor;…
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Comfort and Joy
1 August 2024 Yowza. July was the month that was: first the terrible debate fallout, then the attempted assassination, then Democratic despair over Biden’s determination to continue campaigning, and THEN CrowdStrike’s global software meltdown, followed on Sunday, 21 July by President Biden’s astonishingly brave and patriotic announcement that he was standing down, Vice President Harris’s…
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Home from Wisconsin
21 July 2024 The weather in New Hampshire this Sunday morning has finally returned to the celebrated New England summer temperatures this Florida girl once fantasized about when looking at Lands End catalogs: is’t possible to wear shorts AND a crew neck sweater at the same time? When I arrived home last Wednesday from a…
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Revolution 2024
4 July 2024 On Saturday, 15 June, Durham NH celebrated—six months early—the sestercentennial (aka 250th anniversary) of some doughty Durham residents’ 1774 raid on the British Fort William and Mary in New Castle, enacting there at the mouth of the Piscataqua River the first major act of colonial rebellion that took place four months before…
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Three Graduations and a Funeral, Part 4, 15-21 May 2024: Old Friends
21 June 2024 In the middle chapter of Eudora Welty’s slim volume, One’s Writer’s Beginnings, she writes of “Learning to See”: I think now, in looking back on these summer trips—this one and a number later, made in the car and on the train—that another element in them must have been influencing my mind. The…
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Three Graduations and a Funeral: Part 3, 12-14 May 2024: Blonde Wind
13 June 2024 12 May 2024 began in Whittier NC with my short-term roommate Gina, granddaughter Olivia’s aunt, wishing me a Happy Mother’s Day—a first for me, since I’ve never been a mother; technically a step-grandmother, I found the easy path to grandparenting. Still, that acknowledgment was very sweet, and sustained by that and some…
Georgeann Murphy 