Just Beyond the Thaw
If you travel the back roads near Lake Ontario in winter, you’ll see the orchards standing in their bare honesty. Apple trees—so heavy with color and sweetness in September—now hold their knobby branches against a wide gray sky. They look like old hands lifted in prayer, or in simple surrender. Along the slopes of the…
The Quiet Gift of Nearness
There is a particular ache to this point in winter—a tenderness beneath the ribsthat has no single name. We stand in a season where the days soften unexpectedly,yet the calendar does not thaw enoughto believe in spring. Fog gathers in the mornings like a second sky.Roadsides carry the weary gray of snowlong past its innocence,and…
A Slight Turn of the Wheel
Yesterday I woke to a world remade. Snow had come in the night—unhurried, unannounced—laying its white blessing on everything that would hold it. The garden stood like a congregation of old saints, each dried stalk cupping a soft mound of light, as if grace had weight to it, as if grace preferred the withered things.…
In My Words 