The woods were buzzing with cicada song.
She rearranged the refrigerator again. It seemed almost impossible to keep the foot wide space in the center of the refrigerator clear of all food and containers from top to bottom. She kept telling the kids that the air couldn’t get through and that would cause the motor to quit working. She read all about it in the manual the day it was delivered. Still, kids never paid any attention.
She swept the yard every Saturday. The hard packed red clay had been swept so many times that the roots of the big oak were nearly a foot above the flat ground and snaked thirty feet down beside the house. It was easier work today….
This is a special report from the Intercontinental Radio News. At forty-five minutes before ten o’clock, central time, an un-named official in Washington confirmed that terrorist Osama Bin Laden was entering his third day of interrogation. Yesterday, the interrogation team sent out for two extra…
Flower by Flower debuts Saturday during Art and Music in the Gardens at the Lake Merritt Garden Center in Oakland, CA.
She smiled politely as usual. The nicely dressed lady across from her smiled a tight smile back. Neither would make eye contact again before one was called into the office. That was the way it always was. You never knew who you’d wind up sitting…
The garage/workshop was filled with wonderful trash. Four hundred ballpoint pens in sparkle plastic that didn’t work. Eight hundred heavy-duty industrial coffee filters. Thirty pounds of defective acrylic balls for making plastic flower arrangements. Two hundred dowels from the closed down building supply. A large box of dolls eyes from god knows where.
they were doing nothing
they were sitting around
telling stories about the way the world is
and I could not argue
with the truth
of their sad conclusions
My friend Molly saw a movie documentry called African Cats. I like cats. I like big cats and little cats. Molly’s mom Cheryl said they show the prey getting killed in African Cats. I don’t want to see that. My cat Penny gets prey but it’s different. Today she had a big chipmunk in her mouth that daddy tried to get from her. She ran away fast and over the fence into our neybor Jane’s yard. She still had the chipmunk. I watched her play with her prey. She threw it up in the air and jumped on it. Then she ate it all. Just not the tail. She’s a good hunter.
How could he have known? It surely wasn’t his fault. For five years he had to beat the boy regular, and now this. He had always been the troublemaker. The other seven never gave much trouble. They always minded – especially after a good whipping….
Sitting on the tiny front porch, she looked out on a scene that had gone unchanged for almost forty-four years. New growth on the trees, a few more shrubs, and age enveloping poorly made houses that could not hide their faults. But, still the same.
“But education, since it deals in the first place with human organisms, and in the second place with individualities, is not analogous to a standardizable manufacturing process. Education must measure its efficiency not in terms of so many promotions per dollar of expenditure, nor even in terms of so many student-hours per dollar of salary; it must measure its efficiency in terms of increased humanism, increased power to do, increased capacity to appreciate.”
It was his first trip out of the tiny town. He arrived early. He was nervous and a little afraid. He gave himself time to stop by the drug store. As usual he bought two little bottles of shoe polish. He already had the paper…