Water

An Anniversary Wish to My Wife

The woods ran up to the edge of the pond and every Spring the snow melt would reveal old trees that had…

When winter takes a river

The ice forms surreptitiously, against all probability, when winter takes a river. The pieces form inadvertently…

When the well died

The day the well died it was hot and dry and my father had run out of money for the month.

Herding the sinners: Dore

Gustave Doré’s illustration to Dante’s Inferno. Plate X: Canto III: Charon herds the sinners onto his boat. “Charon the demon, with eyes of glede, / Beckoning to them, collects them all together, / Beats with his oar whoever lags behind.’” (Longfellow’s translation, which isn’t…

People on the beach: 1880’s and Today

In the great scheme of things, how much do things really change?

Life was meaner and the time and space of human emotion more narrow 130 years ago. But the essential components of the human condition were much like they were today.

Soft water

Zephyr

When I was 14 or so, my father reclaimed a sailboat that had been left untended for years on a trailer under the trees near our house. The open…