Is revision destruction or creation? A hike in upstate New York forced this question on me. In August 2017, my husband and I traveled to the Fingers Lakes area to celebrate my birthday. My husband is less of an adventurist and more of plain ol’ good sport, who likes his wife to be happy and…
“Everyone should have a friend that they shouldn’t sit next to at a serious function,” said some meme-maker on Facebook. For my mother, that friend was my grandmother. Their bouts of laughter in awkward places were the stuff of legends. Churches, funerals, confessionals. It didn’t matter. When the spirit or magic struck, they just let…
When my husband and I travel, I like to plan and he likes to just go—no map in hand, no tour guide, no reviews or ratings needed. Opposites to the bitter end, we are. But we’ve figured out a way to compromise. In December of 2019, we visited Kauai with his parents to celebrate their…
Oh, no! Say it ain’t so! At the Robert Frost Interpretative Trail, Ripton, VT, near the Green Mountain National Forrest, the road not taken is, in fact, the road everyone takes—at least the visiting hiker, that is. That famous poem is emblazoned on a sheet of tin near the top of a wooden post, while…
I’m always amazed at how memory shows up in the creative process. This photo (circa 1975) had been lost to me for decades. I recently found it and was surprised how the visual of the mountains resonates in the words from a short story I wrote just a few years ago: Mitch looked into the…
Frank Lloyd Wright is one of my favorite architects, mostly because he was such a prolific architect of homes and churches, leaving a trail of evidence of his perspective and talent in dozens of neighborhoods around the country. With over five hundred of his nearly one thousand designs having been built, his Prairie style or…
