Whitney, June 28, 2013.

When the elevator opens on the third floor, there is a big stripe across the wall. Except no, there isn’t a stripe on the wall, people are walking up to, and under, the stripe, and it isn’t a painting, people are in the painting, and it’s not a painting. The last piece I saw that […]

The Lay of the Land

I have a tree outside my window, which is very important. Some kind of creeping vine is growing around it, hot pink flowers braided into mature scoop-shaped tree leaves. Behind the tree is a fence with barbed wire on top of it. The barbed wire is protecting us from a carpet store, or protecting the […]

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 […]