cultivating the beautiful ordinary by sharing our tales and our tables
When our neighbors bought the house next door nearly a decade ago, my parents quickly provided an account of this couple as if in warning. My folks were “in the know” because the new home owners were relocating from the townhouse development in which they lived just a half-mile away. Apparently this couple received multiple…
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Dormancy All winter long, we surveyed our brittle yard from towering windows, biting our nails, looking at one another furtively. Bald spots like patchy beard growth dotted the hills. “What is happening?” we wondered aloud. We hoped, we prayed for germination. Under the lodgepole and ponderosa pines, where my husband on his knees scraped the…
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The rain fell blue but quickly ran red as it inflicted wound-like paths across our barren backyard. Rivulets turned to ruts as water coursed in fury over red-dirt clay and gravel. Save for a few chunks of quartz, little else was left in the aftermath of this relentless theft of nature. The topsoil, fallen leaves,…
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“A turtle got it,” my dad said to me as I looked with utter devastation at the claw marks on my prized watermelon. I was eight years old and had waited months for my favorite fruit to be ready. Days before I got to cut it open, our neighborhood turtles decided to make it their…
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I watched a nine-minute video about pruning my tomato plants this past June. Planting tomato plants for years, I typically harvested a fairly small yield. This summer, however, I decided a different approach. My body and mind were awakened as I learned about suckers and how they sap energy from the growing crop. How did…
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My father and I argue about trees. I once had a beautiful red maple in my front yard. My husband and I envisioned it natural and towering, shading our bedroom from the fierce summer sun. When it was planted my oldest son hid secret notes in the hole to be buried among the roots. It…
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There’s an ache to my lower back as I stoop and stretch for the next dead branch with my hedge trimmers. Waste bins and brown recyclable bags checker yards up and down the street. Interspersed between each bin, neighbors gather dead things, heaving last year’s baggage away so summer can begin again. Together our bodies…
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It’s been 2 weeks since we moved the first rock, and it’s still an unfinished project.
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As I was preparing to write for this month, I left the window open on my computer with the May writing themes the only words on the page.
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Her hands, tan from the sun, were wrinkled and rough, nails cut short and not a hint of polish.
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