When Life Gives You Tiddlywinks

An only child of seven or eight years old with the long ribbon of summer unfurled ahead of me, I wouldn’t say I got bored a lot. I enjoyed my own company, the cat and dog, and the outdoors with its insects and trees, way too much to be bored. But sometimes I’d be in […]

BETWEEN THE GREYS

Somewhere on the planet as I type this; gurgling, burbling geothermic hotspots spurt predictably (like certain presidential candidates) and just like Old Faithful, Pixar presents us with another animated film. Inside Out is about feelings; so I was putting this one off. Eventually I did give it a watch. Turns out it’s literal, it runs […]

You can’t go home again, can you?

It’s a mix of longing, yearning, nostalgia, or wistfulness for a home of the past.

Delphinapterus Leucas in a Small Town

“A tree is best measured when it is down—and so it is with people.” —from a documentary on creative process, Robert Wilson and the Civil Wars, which was released in 1987. Lincoln: The War Years… Bob Wilson is right. It is true of people too. When society […]

Mrs. Weed’s Peculiar Life

I watched appalled from our upstairs kitchen window as people from all over our neighborhood pulled their cars up to her vacant house and unashamedly dug up her tulip bulbs, pulled up her daffodils, dug out rose bushes, and yanked up black eyed susans and daisies.

Contemplating Bad News or What I Learned About Life By Being An Artist

I ponder, I recollect, I remember, I forgive, I pour over the pictures in my mind and also in my boxes and albums. Perhaps he does the same; but like the day he grabbed the shovel while I simultaneously held the potato chip bag, he gets down to the basics of things. We are different but not so different, really.

Kid Things and Adult Reflection

Did you know that Play-Doh was originally an all white moldable wallpaper cleaner? There was a lot of soot on the wallpaper back then. People used to make a cleaning mixture mixing flour, salt, water and some chemicals to roll up and down the wall to take off the soot. Then Kutol, an early Play-Doh […]

We are all a part of the landscape

In 2001, (pre-nine eleven) when George W. Bush took office (after a close race with Gore… remember the hanging chad debacle?), dozens of computers were discovered with missing W keys. This “prank” did not extend to the West Wing, although in other areas of the White House, they were pried clean off the […]

Childhood Reminiscing, What IS “Conventional” Anyway?

me, what a looker! my mother and I, She kept the bathing suit. I still have it, (the red and white striped bikini) —the elastic is shot but I still have it. Matter of fact, I think, 49 yrs. later, my father still has that brown shirt blowing on the line! I’m not kidding. My […]

Note to the Child Me

NOTE TO MY CHILD SELF I’m an adult with sensory sensitivities and diagnoses of both Aspergers and selective mutism. I remember what it was like to be a child with those challenges. At the time, I thought that because I was so different from everyone else that I must have be an alien dropped […]

Here Be Dragons…When Pipes Are Not Pipes

Stephen King once wrote a short story about the heyday of youth with all it’s freshness and trials. He called youth: Pony days. We all have a brief time as ponies. There were two times during my pony years that I was given horses and both times my father said no, absolutely not, she can […]

Childhood Reminiscing

My school time memories are bittersweet. I am glad they’re over! The highschool library had a series of tables we had to share. There were no cozy niches. The lights were so bright they reflected off the tables.Everything was brown or beige. The drabness of color and lack of pattern was constipating. A patterned […]