One of my saving graces this year has been an enormous Madrone that fell in the park near my home. Surrounded by old growth, I go there Saturday mornings to sit on the three-foot-thick trunk and breathe. Stretching the muscles of my screen-weary eyes I look up, left, down, right. Birds whisper, the scent of cedar cleanses, and once a coyote spirited by. We looked at each other for a long moment, suspended. The year has been strange.
winter love
Hello sweet friends, I'm writing to you from a Saturday afternoon in mid-January, where the light is ever so perceptibly beginning to return. I noticed it two days ago. Morning light came a little sooner and evening arrived a little later. The thin snow melted and something stirred inside me--like a seed roused beneath the soil…