This is what you shall do:  Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants … have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown [...]

Please excuse Auburn’s absence the past few days.  She’s been enthralled with winter.  It’s taken her away from her computer and into that phenomenon known as Spring Cleaning.  The 70-degree temperatures in Phoenix have fooled her, as well as, the leafing trees into thinking that it is time for the semi-annual closet cleaning and leaf [...]

One day Alice came to a fork in the road and saw a Cheshire cat in a tree. “Which road do I take?” she asked. “Where do you want to go?” was his response. “I don’t know,” Alice answered. “Then,” said the cat, “it doesn’t matter.”
- Lewis Carroll

And thus, we thrust ourselves into another [...]

 
Here’s Wilson just before entering big boy boot camp.  He’ll be there one more week, but today I had a visit with him.  I drove up just as he was completing a walk. 
Yes, I said, a WALK!  Not a drag down the street by a huge hairy dog.  A Walk.
Two weeks ago, Wilson’s concept of the [...]

I met Mary during law school.  One day she simply parked herself next to me during class … a Law Ethics class … and then proceeded to flagrantly cheat off me during every exam we were given.  Law Ethics, indeed!  After mid-terms, when she was still peeking looks at my answers, I finally confronted her.  [...]

I’m generally not a fan of rhyming poetry.  Maybe I’m simply lazy and the work to count out meter and locate rhyme is more than my shrinking brain can handle.  (I’ve had brain surgery, you know!)  I’m a free bird kinda gal, but my admiration for the rhymers in our ranks is … well, just [...]

 
Longtime reader and friend, Dave McChesney, shared this photo of his front walkway in Spokane. 
I look out over my desert landscape and can’t imagine such a scene, such cold … such expert shovel work.  Thanks, Dave.  He says he’ll share the same view when it all melts come spring.  In the meantime, he says light fog has [...]

Andrew Wyeth passed on today.  One of my favorite painters; I loved his mature and enduring style, his subdued color palette, realistic renderings, and the depiction of emotionally charged symbolic objects.  His works were poetry on canvas — simple, yet they struck me through the heart.
He was often mentioned in the comic strip, Peanuts, and [...]

All across the country, birds have journeyed away to find warmth for their wings.  People quietly approach their fireplaces to turn the logs because there’s mystery in a fire and to let one’s voice fall over it would somehow be irreverent.  Children pretend snowmen chatter in their front lawns and trees grow blue icicles from [...]

If it falls from my head
and lands anywhere near my fingers,
it may end up here
or at least somewhere near here.
But if it falls from my head
while my hands are in the car, driving
from here to there,
it’s liable to be found at the side of the road.
And if it falls from my head
while I’m showering,
it’s liable [...]