Update 5/15: first noisy little he/she is here!!  When mom or dad stands up, and they will....look underneath.  So cute!  New pip on second egg, and a possible third.  We have herons to watch, people.

 Update 5/14:  Confirmed pip. First chick due to appear tomorrow (5/1… Read full post »

 Look. It's Alan Rickman. Some young people I don't recognize. Playing the roles of Joey Ramone, Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Blondie, Patti Smith (Sting's daughter, Mickey Sumner), and apparently, the role of CBGB's bathroom is playing itself, out of museum retirement.

Release d… Read full post »

I don’t have any spicy barf stories of my own, but my late great momma had one that my sister and I would beg her to tell us over and over again–as teenagers, as adults, and once her mind could not longer hold it, I… Read full post »

Since early April, I've been sticking my beak daily into a great blue heron nest camera set up and monitored by the Cornell Ornithology Lab in Ithaca, New York.  For several cold weeks in April, I watched as a pair of great blue herons lay five eggs and… Read full post »

Once I was a resident in a monastery, a real one, with men in brown robes and shaved heads. It often felt a little like prison, and if you’d been allowed to visit on those days, which you couldn’t, because it was not permitted, I might have begged… Read full post »

It is October. Again. Pink ribbons. Heart wrenching stories of the stricken. Images of courageous smiling bald headed women in pink T shirts. Companies that donate a percentage of product proceeds to research if you buy this or that shampoo, yogurt, deodorant, or spaghetti sauce. Ever… Read full post »

When I was thirteen, I waited. Waited for almost everything, it seemed. For breasts. For periods. For boys to look at me. For adults to take me seriously.

In the meantime, I read. I drew pictures. I danced and sang and played air guitar alone in/… Read full post »

The season is beginning. It’s been a long quiet winter.

In pewter light, I take my seat, an old worn zafu cupped in the shape of me, and wait. Earlier, when it was still dark, I sprinkled bird seed along the fence outside my window, what it costs for a… Read full post »

It is a rare opportunity to understand you are standing at a crossroad, at the exact moment when you are standing at a crossroad.

My mother receives a dropper of morphine by mouth twice a day, and sleeps. I hold her hand, but she has let go. We’ve been/… Read full post »

Sometime in the late nineties: Big Heron, properly and pinkly dressed by Talbots, bracketed by her two leftie bohemian braless chicks. As documented here, and in almost every image of us, I am watching her.  She appears small, yet she is the largest woman I have known. While there… Read full post »

In a still photograph, the movement of leaning in and pulling apart appear the same. Drawing the letter O, there is a moment before beginning and end are joined and cease to exist.

She is immersed in the primordial consciousness of her limbic system. I witness and wait, as she… Read full post »

Many years ago, a friend from Georgia taught me two of her Southern New Year’s traditions: a supper of black eyed peas, and the Fear Bundle. Many Southerners whom I’ve told about the Fear Bundle were unfamiliar with it, and my friend, an artist, may have… Read full post »

Sometime around early September, I discovered a new roommate. He was tidier and more polite than some, a quiet fellow who kept to himself. He didn’t call his girlfriend in California to gab for hours, then move and skip out on an eight hundred dollar telephone bill.… Read full post »

Come September, like a cloud of bats that take off into the summer sky at sunset, they seem aloft everywhere, ghosts. Forty years of life in the same big city offer more sanctuaries than I knew I’d visited. Ghosts of people alive or deceased. Ghosts of memory. Ghosts of… Read full post »

The Ferrari of paper fiber is Belgian flax: tough, long fibers, strong as leather, beautiful color and surface that will last for centuries. When spun and woven into fabric, flax becomes linen. Flax paper is to drawing what linen is to painting, the ultimate surface.

Wearing ugl… Read full post »

We drove from Pittsburgh to Cape Cod in the family station wagon that summer in 1970.  For too many road hours, we’d listened to my dad proselytize about Bookbinder’s Restaurant in Philadelphia, a stop on our itinerary. I was sixteen, lived in a landlocked state, had a moth… Read full post »

For the next few weeks, I’ll be offline and out of cell phone reception, without newspapers, radio, or tv. The daily sound effects will be waves lapping against granite rocks outside a studio built on stilts and connected by boardwalks to other studios. I’ll get up at five o’clock,… Read full post »

Every morning around six, in rain, snow, sleet, summer heat, eight degrees or ninety, I walk the same dear four miles. I’ve seen things, met people, found treasure you would not believe. This morning, I found a long dark feather, the color of licorice, and almost as… Read full post »

You have to pray for her, my sister told me. I could not respond as she desired. I do not believe in a universe small enough to consider individual petition. I believe I was born, then sent spinning away, to explore, to love, to lose, to serve, to suffer, to savor,… Read full post »

The summer of 2007, I tramped through seventy-seven galleries of painting in the Louvre. Late afternoon in the cafe, hepped up on espresso, I made a short list of galleries I could visit in/… Read full post »

Inspired by Ann Nichol's post on the important clothes of her life

In second grade, after it was discovered that I could not see the blackboard, glasses were prescribed, and a life of wearing plastic on my face commenced.  My mother took me to Doig’s Optical Shop, where she and Mr.… Read full post »