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I’ve always loved going through graveyards and reading inscriptions. Since I was a little girl I wondered what mine would be. Famous Lady Writer? She saved the world? I thought Beloved Wife and Mother was such a cliché. Well, the Famous Lady Writer tried poetry and short stories and finished half a novel. Her newspaper column lasted five years. So did her second marriage. This Beloved Wife and Mother turned out to be harder than it looked. And my job directing The Milto

This morning, I woke up in a gloomy mood thinking of all the ways my country is being desecrated. I thought about the way some Germans had watched Hitler take over, and I imagined how they must have felt. I dreaded hauling this old body out of bed. But by the time I had finished my morning prayer, I knew that wouldn’t do. So, I thought I’d be on the lookout for miracles today. According to my definition (thank you, Course in Miracles) miracles are a shift in perception.

One Sunday afternoon this past July, Foster and I went to a concert at First Baptist Church, East Nashville, for a reunion of the “Baptist, Missionary, and Education Conventional Choir.” I wish you could have been there. The choir was organized in May 1972, with the idea of keeping young people in the church, off the streets, and having them do service by performing in other churches. A pool buddy of mine, Deborah Smith, joined when she was in her 20’s. At one time, ther

"Creation: respect it! Our animal kingdom: embrace it! Remember: we are all made in His image. Walk in love and never forget you are not the Judge." -- told to me by a lovely tech when I was having a breast biopsy

Before we had labels for autism, ADHD and thinking disorders, Suzanne’s kid Charly was spoiled, inattentive, irresponsible and strange. Suzanne told me this story: “In the morning before school, I’d lay out everything he needed to get dressed, and I’d pay him a quarter if he didn’t lose anything. I never had to pay him.” These days when I can't find a shoe or a word, I think about Charly, and I try not to think about labels.

A villanelle is a French poetry form with certain rules. It has five stanzas of three lines (called tercets) and a four-line finish. 19 lines in all. The rhyme scheme is simple, ABA in the tercets and ABAA in the four-line finish. So, it’s fun to write. You just make a list of A rhyming words and another of B rhyming words. There’s one more complication: you have repeating lines. You alternate using the first and third lines in the tercets, and finish by using them a

Sometimes it seems life molds our dreams then smashes them to hell, Johnny Weissmuller and Carol Burnett have given us a cue. This is the place to claim your space and do a Tarzan yell! Cheatin’ and lyin’, there’s no denyin’ we’re in for a sorrowful spell, When charlatans are stealing what belongs to me and you, And paid-for men are voted in and twist our laws to hell. So, I can see how it might be that you do not feel well, That you lose hea

It’s more work than it oughta be, it’s harder than it oughta be, and it takes twice as long as you think it should. And I reaffirmed that, under cover of darkness, misgrints creep in. I had lots of good editorial help with my book to take out the mistakes I’d made. And after the first print, I found a few errors and corrected them. That was in September 2025. Last week when I started my new villanelle, I looked at the example in my book, and I realized that the capital "T

(I copied this from somewhere. I hope it's accurate.) Elon Musk was mad at Apple because they weren’t advertising so much anymore. “Don’t they appreciate free speech?” To which Colbert replied: "Elon, Elon, Elon," tutted Colbert. "Free speech means the government can't tell you what to say. It doesn't mean people have to give you money no matter what you say. I know you're mad at them, but they don't hate free speech. They're mad at you because you freed hate speech."

In A Walk on the Wild Side (1956), set in the world of pimps and prostitutes in New Orleans, Algren gives his three rules for life: "Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own." The novel is, in many ways, about the contempt of a nation for its dispossessed, and in it he wrote: "When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ou

This May Sunday afternoon, I look out my window to see Sarah squatting in front of her bright yellow coreopsis. Harre is beside her eating something off of another bush. She is on the other side of the little hedge in front of her house, so I can’t see everything she is doing. The two peonie blossoms that looked yesterday as if they might be going, are not there today, so the bush is very tidy with only three pink buds against the green. Sarah gathers together a handful of

April, 2021 From my porch at the end, I can see all the way down to the giant cottonwood standing majestic, over three stories tall. Two large swings hang from its mighty limbs. Between my porch and the tree, I see our lush rain garden and the row of condos opposite mine. I see Suzanne’s red azaleas, Sarah’s peonies starting to open, Rita’s roses about to bloom, coreopsis and columbine lining the sidewalk. It’s a wet April morning. A mourning dove and a mockingbird share t

In May, 2023, when I had to get a mammogram, I decided to lighten it up a bit. I have a bunch of Frida Kahlo stickers, so I picked one that said, "Love me, because I adore you," and another that said, "Thank You." You know the procedure: they have you go in and remove everything above the waist and have you put on a gown that opens in the front. Then when it’s time, they stand you before the machine, and they help you take out your left arm to put your breast in the ma

I got two spankings in the first grade and had to stand in the hall once. My teacher was an “old maid” named Calla Steinke. She lived a horse pasture and a street away from us with her parents in a duplex with a front porch that faced us. Her parents were deaf, and in the evenings, they’d go out on the porch to escape the heat, and we could hear every word she said. That was before air-conditioning, and the windows were always open. I don’t remember what she said, but it so

My first 12-Step program was Al-Anon, which I went to because a male nurse I knew told me I needed it. I was, after all, married to an alcoholic. But he warned me that I should understand that 12-step programs are spiritually based. Step Two says, “We came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.” He said that a lot of people call their Higher Power “God” and here in the South, “Jesus.” “You don’t have to believe in God,” he told me. “

In a mesquite tree Highter than my house, I see Geese and rhyme with “peace.”

I don’t understand Gone; people, landscapes leave, leave, Their holes in my heart.

My son brings me tea each morning when I first wake up. He gives me my thyroid. I crank up my bed to a sitting position and gather my morning prayers and the list of people I pray for. But since I got my new electric bed, once I’m cranked up, I can’t reach everything I need. So, the other day I got ready to start and couldn’t reach my glasses. I called to him. “Joel, I can’t reach my glasses.” He came in and handed them to me. “Isn’t there Life Alert for this sort of thi

MY LIFE IN THIRTY WORDS Good girl. “I’ll show you!” Married the wrong kind. Three kids, divorces, moves. Checkered career. Milton Center. Retired. Grandchildren. Nashville. Cohousing. Healing. Wrote stuff. Book. Blog. Got old. Starting over. MY LIFE IN TEN WORDS Praise be! My cup runs over Clarity Healing Hard Start MY LIFE IN THREE WORDS Help! Thanks! Wow! I got this as a writing assignment at a retreat in Bennington, Vermont, and I've given it

Back in the 70’s, when I was in my 30’s, there were big ballrooms in the Dallas-Fort Worth area that people flocked to on weekends. A couple of Saturdays a month, my husband and I would dress up and go out in his red Datsun pick-up and drive to some ballroom in the Dallas suburbs. On the way home we’d stop for breakfast at a diner/coffee shop which was variously called Shoneys or Jack Brown or Mickey Mantle, depending on who owned it at the time. One night we parked, had brea