Essays

NOTE: To access Susan’s Childhood Story, click here. For her Sewing Stories, click here. For her Restoration Stories, click here.

At The Airport

Like everything else, the experience of becoming older and more eccentric has two sides.  There are the usual things--not being inclined to bound up and down stairs, maintaining my lists of things to do and keeping them current, and the bouts of doubt because you know you are headed for a different realm.  Read more …

Reflections on Collective Consciousness and Plastic Bags

What is collective consciousness?  As we share time together, finding our way through the pandemic, corrupt autocracies, endless wars, racial injustice, belief in all manner of alternative realities, with the threatening edge of climate change always encroaching more and more on our lives, we may want to check in with this question.  Read more …

The Natural World, or My Raven Friend

Having never studied the natural world scientifically, I am free to make my own study through direct observations.  As part of this study, I include myself. 

As I drew the drape this morning to look out at my back garden I saw that it had almost lightly rained during the night so that the parched pale color of the dry grass had taken on the vivid hues of golden straw tinged with chartreuse.  Autumn had arrived in my garden during the night! Read more …

The Visit of Pelig Wyte

I have tried several ways to recollect the house my sister lived in many years ago.  I can picture it as the small farm I visited in the 1980s when I was a single mom with two young children.  There is also the picture my sister found in an antique shop of their house painted in the 1800s – a long two-story building with large trees close by as carts and horses and people make their way down a dirt road.  Read more …

The Woodyard

My interest in wood fires began when I was quite young.  My sisters and I liked to camp out in our pony's pasture, building a fire to accompany our ghost stories and roasting marshmallows.  Read more …

The Strange Spider

Last night when I turned on the bathroom light to get ready for bed, I saw a spider quickly crawling down the wall where he tucked behind my good-sized wooden nail brush to hide from me. Read more …