Category: Uncategorized
-
A glooming peace this morning with it brings / 26 Jan 2023
I woke yesterday to what had become the unaccustomed sound of silence from our propane-guzzling generator, which had been running non-stop from 4-something am Monday morning until 2 .07 am Wednesday morning, powering enough circuits to keep heat on and water flowing throughout the most recent if long delayed snow storm of the season. How…
-
Submechaniphobia 15 January 2023
My friend Wendy is a fearless adventurer, downhill skier, and scuba aficionado, in addition to her many other accomplished roles including art historian, curator, and first-class cook. I already knew that when yesterday this photo showed up in my email linked to a Facebook post she had made: Wendy inside a Lockheed L1011 air intake…
-
Twelfth Night January 6, 2023
In the past, Epiphany has evoked for me many things beyond the charming tale of the three wise men (the assistant magus, the associate magus, and the full magus as Garrison Keillor once told the story) paying homage to the newborn king of the Jews. As an English major, I was taught to associate an…
-
Remembering Virginia
At 5.15 on the evening of 2 January 2008, my mother, Virginia Ruth Senseman Murphy, departed this dimension six months shy of her 85th birthday. On this evening almost exactly 15 years later, I am missing her, but recalling lines from Will It Be Okay?, Crescent Dragonwagon’s 1977 picture book classic in which a worried…
-
Richard Parker, Ritual, and the Salutary Power of Story, 31 Dec 2022
Terrestrial icebergs line my Madbury driveway this last day of 2022, plow- and weather-sculpted remnants of the one seasonal snowfall we had before the high winds and warm rain of Winter Storm Elliott’s bomb cyclone melted all the other snow and ushered in this dull, overcast, 53o last day of 2022. Last days always seem…
-
Christmas Day at Wallis Sands
Though I have lived in New Hampshire since 1995, the beach in winter has not yet lost its novelty for this Florida cracker, remaining for me an exotic inversion of the warm Gulf beaches of my youth in St. Petersburg: white sand and palm trees replaced by rocks and sea ice. Finding myself solo this…
-
Hinge Moments: The Orchard and The Crown / 20 Nov 2022
Ever since Daylight Saving Time ended two weeks after I broke my ankle in an earlier careless misstep, I’ve mostly wanted only to eat and to sleep, especially in the mornings when REM time offers the most interesting, sometimes fantastical, sometimes illuminating dreams. I really enjoy what I’ve come to call this recreational sleep, perhaps…
-
Fall 2022
Ten days ago I was having a fairly productive day, having gotten up early (8:00 is early for this retiree) and marched through my to do list while Sarah, my house cleaner of many years, worked her magic. Shortly after she left in the early afternoon, I was coming downstairs in my clogs carrying the…
-
Halloween 2022
My Grandpa Cecil—Zeke to his friends—was born on Halloween 1897, and today would be his 125th birthday. A true American success story, Cecil Calvert Senseman was the eldest child of Ohio farmer Ed Senseman and his wife Bertha, who died in 1912 when Cecil was 15. Their mother’s death separated Bertha’s children; Cecil, his younger…
Georgeann Murphy 