A home that caught my eye in Salem. Definitely not the house I grew up in. In grad school, I had a final exam with a one word question. We had to write about this one word. (For the life of me, I can't remember how much time were were given, but it was at …
I was planning to write about the winter storm here in Texas, the surprise of being without electricity or heat from 2am Monday to 1am thereabouts Thursday. We didn't lose water, thank goodness, but plenty of my friends and students did. Some people are still without water. Aside from the love, dogs provide heat! We …
October arrives! Welcome witches and all! I'm here for it, in spite of everything. But this post isn't really about Halloween. One of my goals as we in this hemisphere slide into winter is to create more space or rather to clear out more stuff that I do not need. Last year, I tried the …
My dad once told me I only got headaches because I'd seen Tylenol advertised on TV. "I've never gotten a headache," he said, "and we didn't have a TV when I was a kid." To be sure, he said it like a joke. My dad says everything like a joke. I didn't see him take …
I spent a lot of time alone as a child. The first reason is that I was an only child. But some only children are surrounded by people, cousins, neighborhood children. I have lots of cousins but they all lived hundreds of miles away. I saw a few of them when they came to see …
Last week I watched a storm across this lake. The wind chopped up the water and heat lightning cracked in the distance. I stood in the grass, barefoot, and with people important to me. Most of the time, Florida brims over with bugs, humidity, and evil-intent. It reminds me of things I want to forget …
I still have my little altars of objects and treasured things. We still have hundreds of books. No one is ever going to walk into this house and say, "Are you a minimalist?" I feel that's important to make clear before I again mention that most trendy of lifestyle phenomenon names Marie Kondo and confess …
Fall gives me energy. Maybe it's all those years starting school in the fall, going to the store to buy new notebooks and folders that made me feel like everything was beginning all over again. My dad wasn't one to take me shopping much. He was a single dad and so shopping for my shoes, …
Continue reading The End Summer and the Beginning of New Things
The summer season here in the northern hemisphere is winding down. Are you a summer sort of person? I'm not really. I prefer fall, the crisp change in the air (although still a ways off yet in Texas) and the fun of Halloween. How far away from your hometown do you live? Have you left …
I grew up in the Florida boondocks. A few feet from my side bedroom window grazed cows. Looking out the back windows of the house, we saw our backyard, more cows, and highway 27. A field of overgrown grass stood between us and our neighbor. Our property, divided in half by the road, extended down …
Marta Pelrine-Bacon 