Dear M______,
Thank you for your letter. I’m not really sure how to respond, so let me write through it….

Maundy Thursday 2020: Reflecting on a bare altar in a time of bare churches.

I didn’t plan to write about my cat this week, but here we are. 

When I left the house Thursday morning, he was sitting contently in our bedroom window, enjoying sunlight and bird flight. I didn’t know it would be his last morning with us. 

Even with my son’s graduation three hours away, I couldn’t resist the temptation to do yardwork Saturday afternoon. As I worked in the sunshine, a memory surfaced. In his toddler years, Michael would pull out all the little plastic garden tags from my gardens and flower beds. My young son’s shenanigans left me to only guess at what was growing…

Good poetry is the lembas bread of literature. It doesn’t take long to read, but it takes a long time to digest.

It’s my birthday! And to celebrate I’m pulling weeds for my dad in his vast garden. My phone’s weather app reports 86 degrees, but it feels hotter. Maybe that’s just the 91% humidity talking. Some may say I’m crazy to be gardening in the mid-day sun on my day off…

Our recent family vacation focused on the two national parks best known for their biodiversity. So here, with some great photos from my daughter (and a few from me), I present Five Amazing Things from our trip to the Everglades and the Smoky Mountains National Park.

The bridge to my son is difficult — An assembly of quirks, twitches, snatches of Television dialog laid out and lashed together with Green and blue pills taken once daily. There are Boards missing, replaced with acronyms; Plans written down, filed and Forgotten. He could be an island entire and to himself. But Uncle Larry…

A gap opening up in the treetops and a bruised cloud Blamelessly filling the space with purples. Everything Changes and moves in the split second between summer’s Sprawling past and winter’s hard revision. – from “Fall” by Edward Hirsch (Read the full poem)  

Last winter I had the pleasure of attending the AWP Writer’s Conference in Washington D.C. My hotel was within blocks of The National Portrait Gallery and American Art Museum, where I spent an inordinately long time in front of a work titled “The Throne of the Third Heaven of the Nations’ Millennium General Assembly.”