Coleridge's Flower

Marty sat on a chair in the middle of a darkened stage. An overhead spot spread a cone of light around her.  I stood in front of her and she looked up at me and gestured.  Her lips moved, but the stage was silent.

 

It was clear she was trying to tell me something, to ask me something. She was near imploring.  I sensed another person in the shadows just outside the circle of light.  It felt like a male presence. A young man.  He seemed to be waiting and watching, and also silent.

Reverie

Fifty miles to the east, snow melts on Mount Baker and lightning flares in the roiling billows of ash. The windows of our lighthouse on Patos Island rattle as the ground bucks and rumbles, like birth contractions of the earth in labor. Diane plays Debussy’s “Reverie” and it seems to calm the children.

Before Gulliver, there were New Year's Resolutions

Looks like it’s time for “New Year’s Resolutions.”  But we’re not the first.  Before he wrote Gulliver’s Travels, a 32-year-old Jonathan Swift wrote some resolutions that he titled, “When I come to be old.”

Here are some selections from his 1699 list, [[refreshed for 2014]]: