greening
every spring is the only spring — a perpetual astonishment. — ellis peters the city girl and the country girl said it smelled like worms out of doors today, what with all the rain. i rescued two gigantic night crawlers yesterday and remembered worms have a definite, distinct feel in one’s hand. i always associated … Read more
petrichor
my dears, it rained today. from all sounds, it is still raining, and the wind is howling around the house most delightfully. i like soft, gentle, lazy afternoon rain, but i really love thunderstorms best. i love the joyous violence of lightning and thunder, howling winds and driving rain. the only person who can tame … Read more
infinite, incarnate
the sky is darkened confined, time-bound by a veil of cloud only a single star can pierce through. so sometimes i feel constricted, limited by the selective world of my own mind and long for something someone to shatter my smoke-glass ceiling so i can see the stars. i am very small, 100 trillion cells … Read more
and noun you know
hey! boycott that maverick leotard-wearing silhouette — he’s eating a sandwich in a lamborghini, for pete’s sake! oh no, wait — it gets even worse! his wife’s sitting next to him in a cardigan and bloomers, combing the shrapnel out of his sideburns. pull on your wellington boots and rev up your zeppelins, boys; i … Read more
selfishness
i was thinking about this today. or, actually, just now: selfishness is such a weird concept. or maybe insidious is a better word for it. or subtle. i always thought selfishness was kind of an obvious thing, like not sharing your toys or giving your little brother the smaller of two cookies and taking the … Read more
rule 13: omit needless words
vigorous writing is concise. a sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. this requires not that the writer make all sentences short, or avoid all detail and treat subjects only in outline, but … Read more
Passion
“let this image of Christ crucified be always printed on our hearts. let it stir us up to the hatred of sin, and provoke our minds to the earnest love of Almighty God.” — anglican homily of passion today is palm sunday, which begins holy week, leading up to Easter sunday, with the remembrance of … Read more
words, words, words
“words, words, words — i’m so sick of words,” eliza dolittle exclaims in my fair lady. i love words. but sometimes they are so inadequate. is it only writers who struggle to write? i feel sometimes that the words we have are so used up they don’t mean anything anymore, not really. they’re fraying on … Read more
eliot and the evening
one of the foibles of being a copy editor is that your deadline is king, and so your social life sometimes falls by the wayside. being at a weekly, i get to work during the day like a normal person, but on thursday, our production day, outside life is put on hold ’til the paper … Read more
