River Muse

The Rising of the Hellebores

It’s hard to be a pagan in this culture, where holidays like Easter lift our spirits and the economy at once. Jewish friends have their religious traditions, respected by most Christians. Even …

They got you coming and going

At a recent town board meeting, a citizen inquired about being billed for water coming into his home and then again for waste water going out. Weren’t we being double billed, he asked. It …

Peppy and Esther

The workshop was well underway when the door opened and a woman trailing a wheeled suitcase appeared, accompanied by the workshop director, who introduced her as Peppy, our missing colleague. There …

Love

A friend writes, “Humans have penetrated almost every corner of the planet, figured out how to fly, built skyscrapers and submarines, artificial hearts and yet, emotions still baffle us, …

The grandchild

Everyone says there is nothing like it. But you don’t know until you know. “What’s it like?” a writer friend asks after a session at the literary festival in Narrowsburg …

At seven-one

If you had asked me, when I was seven years old, what my life would be when I was 71, I might have said something like this: “I will live in a house near the water, maybe a river or the sea, …