Category: <span>The Bean</span>

Washing the sand with my ghostly tears

The Lion and the Cobra by Sinéad O’Conner is being played on my turntable right now. It seems fitting. My second copy, I wore one out the very year it came out. The year that my life imploded, well one of the times. I was young and painfully naive. It …

Some of us think holding on

makes us strong, but sometimes it is letting go. ~Herman Hesse It’s been, as they say, a journey. And I’m standing in the doorway, crossing from what was to what is becoming. Our daughter moved into her first apartment in September. It was a chaotic move, as these things can …

Another last minute

“There is always time for another last minute” ― Terry Pratchett, Hogfather It wasn’t the best news, but we aren’t giving up. And it never gets easier. Mr. Teatime was named for a character in the Pratchett book Hogfather. Mr. Teatime, when he was a kitten was a tiny little …

Just write

I know the way to be a writer is to write. I’ve told that to students. I used to write every day. Somewhere along the line, survival took over. I was working full time and going to school full time. I lived in a tiny apartment in a kinda bad …

Not this or that, somewhere in between

Every time I think I’m going to give up with this long long long standing blog, I come back. This is a long one, hold on. Will it click this time, again? I don’t know. The last year and a half has been, well, large.  Purging a lot. A LOT. …

So the Darkness Shall Be the Light

The Winter Solstice is one of my most thoughtful times. I suppose because I spent so much time with darkness. That sounds terribly dramatic–and it was until I found a way to live with it.

Sweet Bean you are 13

At some point this week our wonderful girl is going to turn 13. 13. I never understood when grownups said that time actually moves so fast since the time between 2:45 and 3:00 pm seemed to take hours.  But looking through her baby pictures and home movies I feel like …

A Moment as her Mother

I picked Em up from school yesterday and as usual, we talked about her day. It’s tough to concentrate when she doesn’t feel well, but she really tried and wanted to, she told me. I told her how happy I was to see her. She said “really Mom? you say …

Nobody who says, ‘I told you so’ has ever been, or will ever be, a hero.― Ursula K. Le Guin

I suppose if you look at things from a more optimistic point of view, they turn out to be adventures, not terrifying hurtles down the side of an icy mountain on a trashcan lid at a high rate of speed right? I hope in the years to come that this …

In the name of God, stop a moment, cease your work, look around you.Leo Tolstoy

The prompts from both places are similar…what nourished your soul this year, what was your best moment. I would say we haven’t had many of them this year but we have had some… Halloween, our 13th anniversary and a houseful of kids and their families in our spooky house was …