Stories & Essays

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Our Summer Vacation: A True Story of Bugs and Boats

Since childhood, memories of summer vacations have meant a relaxing of tensions: lazy mornings flowing effortlessly into the warmth of sunny afternoons while we shagged flies or lay in the grass with open books whose pages rarely turned or sat on the porch watching the neighborhood amble slowly by. Miraculously, time itself seemed to hesitate […]

Our America

Pollsters report that a significant number of Americans name political polarization as a major issue. Voices keep shouting out from TV and computer screens to clocks that wake us in the morning to car radios that scream at us as we gingerly try to make our way through traffic. The question reverberates: Are we who […]

Golden Boy

They said Auriel (Aury) Lugner was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he always demurred. Silver was never good enough. In this as well as other respects he was, like most children, a product of parental presence and absence, although in his family that absence often took the form of mental as […]

Innocence

he looks across the valleysmall holdings, fruit trees and vinesa dark man leans on a shovelgrapes in a cart are the worldthe air is cooldropping the leavesa hawk banks toward the ridgeoptimism rises like sap in the springhe is insane his edifice has crumbledhe stares at the screensmall women and men stare backthey turn to […]

Yardwork

Green and golden they flutter down from the katsura, oak and maple treesNudged gently by the breeze of late September, they float to earthAwakening childhood memories of that brief interludeWhen bright blue warmth of summer skies fades intoClouds of smoke curling upward from burning piles of fallen leaves. Time to clean up our act!Do our […]

Godscape of Clouds

cumuli from Canaletto’s canvasunder sail on the ocean skyaccumulate in the westdrifting east in billowing floretsjuggled by Zeus nimbus lowers and creepsup a draw to a final jeteonly to fall before the Harpyiaeand release its moistureover the parched hills lenticular slips its mountain mooringstretches an elastic lanceto the Klickitat countrya daring alien craft intrudingat ease […]

Portland, Oregon: Then and Now

Some years ago while sitting with a fellow Portlander in a coffee shop in Friday Harbor, a charming town in the San Juan Islands, a Washington State Ferry stop between Anacortes, Washington and Sidney, British Columbia and home to a pod of orcas, a marine science laboratory and a bevy of old salts from Seattle, […]

All My Relations

I want to thank all my relations for this chance to be on Earth in her time of flourishing; to thank the First People of this place, to honor their sovereignty in long and continuing relation, still teaching us how we might be here together; to thank my mother and father, moon and sun, for […]

The Replacements

My parents are missing. I think it happened around the time that my daughter was born. I am embarrassed to say that I was so consumed by being a new mommy that I didn’t notice at first that they had disappeared. My daughter is now three years old. Don’t worry. My daughter has wonderful grandparents. […]