Bubble an' Squeak

Tell all the truth but tell it slant — (1263) Tell all the truth but tell it slant — Success in Circuit lies Too bright for our infirm Delight The Truth's superb surprise As Lightning to the Children eased With explanation kind The Truth must dazzle gradually Or every man be blind — By Emily Dickinson I told the truth, but I told it  slant . Raised always to be a good girl, go to Church, take the Sacraments, be a good student, work hard, study hard, pray hard. The reward for all of this was a completely miserable existence. As the years dragged on, the truth was so bleak, I told it, just slant.  If I could make my story happy, it would be happy. Writers say the story is all in the way you frame it. Maybe if I slanted the truth just enough, twisted it in the light like a prism - just the right way, the truth would be a rainbow emerging from storm clouds. Shattering the darkness. If I laughed a little, and twisted it just a tad, and then a tad more, the clouds appeared to blow ...

 I have always wondered why my grandmother died. She was dead long before I was born; my dad was just two years old. His father, his brother and his sister were left on the farm in Northern Maine to fend for themselves. Dad tells me stories of sitting on the floor of the tractor with his brother. Dad was the brake, Clayton was the gas. Cindy was up top steering the tractor across the fields to help their dad, shouting commands at her two younger brothers. There are whispers in the family about her death: A hysterectomy gone wrong? Something about her lady parts? Had she lost another baby? These mysteries are bound in the recesses of time, lost to those of us who stand before her black and white photo and wonder, who she was, and why she left so early. It seems the women in my family have had hard luck with early deaths, and desperate lives. My aunt Cindy went on to see her father remarry and bring three more children into the family. My Grandmere loved them and raised them all - to...

The Strawberry Moon is waning, while the Buck Moon hovers in the-not-too-distant July, waiting his turn. The elk seem to know their moon is rising as they wandered down the Spring Creek Trail Monday morning. I had a chance encounter as I ran by, turning my head at just the right moment. Two buck with their velvet antlers lay in the bright, green grass. It is a rare treat to see elk in town among us city dwellers with all of our noise and oblivion to the furious beauty of the summer. They twitched their ears at me as I snapped a quick photo.  Nic says I cannot describe Nature in terms of gentleness and peace. I cannot say, “The gentle warmth of summer.” He reminds me that the natural world is a brutal world where most animals die terrible deaths of great pain and a lot of starvation. I must be a realist and accept this reality. That guy kind of ruins the metaphors I churn up, or the symbolism I try to pull out. Summer is boiling by at a speed I don’t really appreciate. We are past t...

My construction paper sign waves sadly in the wind. The yarn clumsily pokes through either end of the paper and tied to the lowest branches of the tree announced the only rule in our club: No Boys. This is a convenient rule as there are no boys to be found to belong to our club of 3. I secretly want boys, but our brothers are all too old to be part of our club, and there are no other boys in the neighborhood who are acceptable.  The Pensingers  - the boys across the street - are too young, and our family is fighting with them because they gave us a bike and then took it back. As a result, we are forbidden from speaking to the Pensingers. Are we forbidden? I can’t remember. I know we don’t speak. Which is a problem because I am still secretly in love with Jared, Pensinger #2, Please don’t tell. It is embarrassing because he is much younger than me, which makes my crush so weird. But love is love. I can’t help that I love him. I think my sister suspects my crush, which is why sh...

 It was all so different than I expected. I found your broken heart. I found it in the neighborhood tiny library amid trashy romance novels, and strange self-help books. It was stashed in the back behind some canned food. Curious, I picked it up and watched little pieces of your heart fall out into my hands. I didn’t expect your heart to just crumble when I opened the cover. I expected it to hold itself together a little better.  I put it back on the shelf, but I put it in front of the canned food, in case you came by, realizing it was missing. I was sure you were coming back for it. No one just leaves a broken heart on the bike trail.  I turned my purple running shoes toward the trail and trotted off - leaving the bits of you there.  But I kept thinking about them. Who leaves their heart in the tiny library? Who lets the whole world, or at least the neighborhood, see their messy, broken pieces?  Did your heart break and someone else picked up the little pieces ...

 It was all so different than I had expected.  There, on a rainy day in June, was a red, leather-bound photo album set in the neighborhood free library. The first few pages were worn, with the photos slipping out. I had expected to leaf through these photos and to be able to see the story of these people. I had expected the photos to explain the mysterious appearance of this album.  Instead, the album is totally nondescript - not remarkable, or special in any way. I have been feeding and tending to my inner artist, so I hoped she would look at this album and a brilliant story would blossom out of her. Instead, she sat for two days staring at the album, and then reading her book.  This is not how good stories begin. “I found a totally boring photo album and absolutely nothing happened. It was not magic, as I had previously hoped. It does not appear to contain any ghosts either.” Yet, someone appears to have lost this album, and with it, the memories of these lives - h...

My Substack is filled with messages of despair: the U.S. has bombed Iran, Israel and Palestine continue their three years of war, Russia and the Ukraine send drones back and forth, while their people dig new trenches in the scars of previous trenches and previous wars that scatter the landscape of Europe.  Where is Hope in this moment? I wonder about Hope as the flowers fall off of the fully bloomed tree in these early days of summer. My running shoe presses the petals of these sweet flowers further into the concrete. Squishing them flatter, wasting their beauty. Rather than scoop up these precious tokens of summer, I stamp them down as if they are insignificant as I run by. It is also summer in Iran, Israel, Palestine, Ukraine, and Russia. Do their trees bloom in the face of destruction? Does life continue to fight its own battle against the destruction we unleash upon each other? Does Nature dare to Hope?  In Braiding Sweetgrass,  Kimmerer asks the reader to offer their...