BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… AMERICAN FRONTIERS. The caravel’s sails billowed and orchestral music swelled. I was glued to the TV that early summer of 1992, watching a PBS documentary on Columbus and the New World. Shot on location in the Caribbean as well as Spain, the documentary included panoramic scenes of warm Floridian skies, the dark…
BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… THE WARRIOR POETS. The sun was hot that late afternoon and bits and pieces of the moment still float somewhere in my memory. We were parked out back behind the old high school — now the junior high, a red brick monstrosity augmented by appropriately boring brick cubes added to expand learning…
BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… THE SPIDER AND THE BOAT. The great garden spider, all bright yellow and stark black, was still and waiting on her weaving web there amid blooming iris and peonies and vivid purple clematis. The garden was in the front yard, stretching across nearly the length of the house and was bookended by…
THINKING’ ABOUT… THE MINSTREL OAKS. The shadow of the afternoon sun’s heat remained, covering the deep greens of the tightly mown fairgrounds, covering the land and sky itself and making the forest beyond the gravel road wave slightly, a shimmer as though of another time and place. Beyond the line of dark forest, the sun…
BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… MOUNTAIN MAGIC. I clench the Arkansas diamond in my small palm, imagining in my five-year-old mind that the clear quartz crystal is a real diamond and, more than that, that the cheap quartz has real magic. I had picked the crystal out of a rock box in a dimly lit mom-and-pop curio…
BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… THE ZOMBIE STORY HOUSE. The young maple leaves play a sweeping tapestry across the white limestone bricks, big, thick, crystal limestone the color of a tawny lion in a faraway land. The house was a good house, is a good house, but no one lives here, not anymore. The windows are dark…
BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… BRICKS IN TIME. I’m doing my best to stay awake, leaning back in the overstuffed couch as the clock ticks toward midnight. I’m catching up on my favorite science fiction series, a series now only a mere 30 years old. On the screen, the captain is, uncharacteristically, scrubbing clams, leaning back against…
BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… WORDS, ARTS, CRAFTS & TOMATOES. “It always comes back to the words,” I type on my comfortable old laptop this balmy late-April afternoon as the dogs drape themselves over the furniture, dozing, awaiting their walk. The StateoftheOzarks season hasn’t opened, not quite. But the clock is ticking. Five days. The StateoftheOzarks (formerly…
BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… TELEVISIONS FOREVER. The florescent light was bright in the old store, all cheap wood paneling and thin green carpet. The Friday evening was chilly and damp and I, following my parents, tread lightly, threading my way past aging television sets in various stages of disrepair. The shopkeeper was talking about TVs, naturally,…
BEEN THINKIN’ ABOUT… A CUP OF PEACH TEA. Last week’s floods and storms and my chest cold are now memory, history washing away. Rest has been a healing boon recently, rest being something I say little about. First, much of my schedule doesn’t allow such things. Second, if I do talk about resting, I am…