Thoughts on Nest by Esther Ehlrich
I loved this book about a young girl who loves birds, who searches for them, spots them and spouts out their facts, a girl whose name speaks a bird’s earliest sounds, Chirp. Chirp dances through her life in Cape Cod. She watches, as if through binoculars, as those around her try to cope with a year of change. Her mother, a dancer who taught her to see the world, its lilaacs, its stars, and its graceful swan boats, has been diagnosed with MS. Her sister flits between childhood
Photographs and ‘A Coney Island Of The Mind’
I go to Coney Island in as many seasons as I can, to capture the land of my imagination on camera. The people are as vibrant as the amusements. This past trip made me think of a book of poems by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, A Coney Island of the Mind. Here’s a small snippet from #21 At a certain age her heart put about searching the lost shores And heard the green birds singing from the other side of silence
The joy of friends and memory. New England. The sorrows of parting.
I just returned from a trip to New England, where I slept in a house set among the most gorgeous trees. We were ‘out of service’. No internet. No phone. We hiked and walked, kayaked and cooked. Together, with my parents, we celebrated the life of one of their best friends, my Uncle John, whose ashes flew away from the top of the great Mount Snow, and, at its slope, in his memory, I remembered my own childhood visits to Vermont. My black diamond triumph. The smoky wooden smell
Slow Books — The Patient Reader and Writer
Since my son’s birth, I’ve been thinking a lot about time. I think of it in broad, mountain-range ways. How the days are long but the months race ahead. How it doesn’t ever fall backwards. How I will never know my son as a newborn again. I think of it as a choice. How I choose to spend time a certain way, how I struggle in my imperfection, trying to be present in moments, without skipping quickly ahead. I think of it in minutes on a clock. The next feeding. The next nap. In m
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