Affichage des articles dont le libellé est family. Afficher tous les articles
Affichage des articles dont le libellé est family. Afficher tous les articles

mercredi 21 octobre 2009




I still don't quite understand how,
the door shuts.

Perhaps the human heart has only so much room for things.

Perhaps it has a breaking point, boundaries and moats and limits.

This heart might have many walls and no windows.

It may have towers and turrets and forests to hide in, walk through.

The doors to this heart may not be clean and straight.

They may be craggy and weathered, keyless and dark.

But there may be curtains too, in this heart.

Curtains that let some light pass, curtains that can be ruffled with a breeze,
a breath.

Velvet curtains with cords for raising and for lowering,
made for marking the beginnings and endings of stories
told there on the heart's stage.

There may be slides and rafts and great plains and endless expanses where
the forgotten things roam;
where the forgotten ones go.

And the heart may receive visitors every so often.

Visitors who sit and are still and who are warm and familiar and who belong.

Visitors who roam and stalk the stage and the plains, who dare adventure there,
and who go to places that you had not dared to go
visit;
inside your own heart.

Some must be shown the exit,

the door,

the curtain.

But perhaps these visitors cannot leave once they enter.
Perhaps new divides are made to hem them in,
to keep them safe;

to keep us safe from them.

Perhaps they huddle there close together in the great seabreeze that blows through this
heart's ocean, on tiny boats or on this heart's ferry which travels between the many places a
heart holds.

Like the great white ferry we took.
To come here.
To find you.
To find out what was in your heart all of these years.

mardi 14 avril 2009

After a time he began to wander about, going lippity-lippity, and not very fast.


i spent a very pleasant monday morning in the children's book section of shakespeare and company...the windows were all open and i sat on a tiny chair and read. the world melted away as i remembered countless hours on countless armchairs and couches and beds listenting to my mother and grandmother read to me, and later reading to them, and even later reading to myself in the hollow of my favorite tree or in the green room at the theatre or at my father's dining room table.

below is a list of some of my favorite books. it's so funny how instrumental they have been in the life i have created for myself...from madeline in the streets of paris to the bowls of blueberries and milk in the boxcar children to harriet-the-spy-like the careful observation of people i see on streets and in trains...images from all of these stories creep into my life constantly. i feel so blessed to have spent a childhood in the company of these wonderful characters and to notice when parts of them seep into my adult life.

The Day Jimmy's Boa ate the wash
Ramona Quimby, Age 8
Tuck Everlasting
Madeline's Rescue
If You Give a Mouse a Cookie
The Tale of Peter Rabbit
A Porcupine Named Fluffy
The Boxcar Children
Caddie Woodlawn
From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
Ghost Cat
Harriet the Spy
Matilda
more to come...