Weight

“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately.” -Thoreau A monastery isn’t a place of professional goody-two-shoes. It is a place where people live deliberately, so much so that the deliberateness soaks into you if you spend some time there. Everything seems to have been done on purpose. In my guest room, […]

Gunplay

At the paternal family farm, there were my teetotaling great-grandparents living in their crackerbox house, where they had eked out a sort of a living. They were German and Norwegian and Lutheran. Everything smelled like old people and dust. My paternal great-grandfather managed to buy a place where, during the Depression, they could shoot possums […]

Gypsy

I always wanted to be a gypsy for Halloween. Scarves, jewelry, long skirts. I had never seen an actual gypsy. It was only when I went to Rome that I encountered one, a woman prostrate on the sidewalk. I was walking around the Vatican, from St. Peter’s square to the museum entrance. There was some […]

Problems

Is a squirrel a problem? When I first moved into this place, there were spiders. Spiders, spiders everywhere, and not a drop to drink. I screamed when I saw them, and ran into another room, and my stomach tangled, and I wanted a fetal position and a security detail. I cried. Today, when I see […]