A Tidings of Magpies

It is a kind of love, is it not? How the cup holds the tea, How the chair stands sturdy and foursquare, How the floor receives the bottoms of shoes Or toes. How soles of feet know Where they're supposed to be. I've been thinking about the patience Of ordinary things, how clothes Wait respectfully in closets And soap dries quietly in the dish, And towels drink the wet From the skin of the back. And the lovely repetition of stairs. And what is more generous than a window?

there's a train a-coming. don't need no ticket, you just get on board." Went to a funeral today, my hubby's co-worker, dead at age 54. What once sounded old to me has changed over the years I realized as I stood with our friends in the early afternoon light on this beautiful golden October day and watched the casket being placed into the hearst. Because we are nurses, doctors, respiratory therapists and we daily watch the current of morbidity, mortality pass by us it's easy to believe that we are safe on dry land protected from those chilling waters. But life is what it is. No more, no less. Few words of comfort for the group gathered here today. Michael had collapsed at work and the resuscitation attempts were done by those who knew and loved him well. "All the King's horses and all the King's men..." During the service I had the uncomfortable feeling of being at the losing end in a game of Tug of War and the priest knew he was dragging us all th...

This past summer we spent two weeks in one of our most favorite places in the world with two of our most favorite people. Last week one of those people, the "best man" at our wedding, underwent a mastectomy and is now learning about her options for chemo and radiation therapy. If she were my blood sister I would sign up for this study in a hot second, but she's not, and I can't. I can spend money for products that donate to research, but I can offer very little hands-on help for my friend and it's breaking my heart. If anyone out in the blogosphere is interested and eligible for a sisters' study check out Army of Women. please note: art by Nancy Dunlop Cawdrey

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman down beside you at the counter who says, Last night, the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder, is this a message, finally, or just another day? Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the pond, where whole generations of biological processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds speak to you of the natural world: they whisper, they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old enough to appreciate the moment? Too old? There is movement beneath the water, but it may be nothing. There may be nothing going on. And then life suggests that you remember the years you ran around, the years you developed a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon, owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have become. And then life lets you go home to think about all...

I live in a bi-political party household and, while I don't have the luxury of feeling smug and sanctimoniously intelligent about all my decisions, it has made me a better listener forcing me to be more tolerant of the thoughts driving diverse opinions. The one thing I am hearing from everyone I hang with is that WE ALL WANT THINGS TO CHANGE in our country and we all want it to change for the better. That alone is something to unite us as Americans despite the ever escalating negative campaign ads. For those youngsters voting in this election who are sick and tired of hearing about the Sixties and fighting old battles --close your eyes, cause you ain't gonna wanna to hear about the Forties either. But, as my BFF Winston Churchill stated after Victory in Europe and after he was roundly defeated in Britain's first General Election since 1935, "They are perfectly entitled to vote as they please. This is democracy. This is what we've been fighting for." I may ...

Thought I'd write a few words for a friend who has left the fair CinCity for Germany. Rachel is one of our new nurses from the Neurodrama ICU. She has gotten herself a job working in the United States military hospital at Landstahl and we,of course as Mama Birds are want to be, are hugely impressed and proud of our young chickie. God bless, girlie, write soon and have a fantabulous time.

Happy New Year, Mr. Morrison "I saw you standing with the wind and the rain in your face And you were thinking 'bout the wisdom of the leaves and their grace When the leaves come falling down In September when the leaves, come falling down"

Grandmothers who wring the necks Of chickens; old nuns With names like Theresa, Marianne, Who pull schoolboys by the ear; The intricate steps of pickpockets Working the crowd of the curious At the scene of an accident; the slow shuffle Of the evangelist with a sandwich board; The hesitation of the early-morning customer Peeking through the window grille Of a pawnshop; the weave of a little kid Who is walking to school with eyes closed; And the ancient lovers, cheek to cheek, On the dance floor of the Union Hall, Where they also hold charity raffles On rainy Monday nights of an eternal November. please note: photo by Larry Fink

You are young. So you know everything. You leap into the boat and begin rowing. But, listen to me. Without fanfare, without embarrassment, without any doubt, I talk directly to your soul. Listen to me. Lift the oars from the water, let your arms rest, and your heart, and heart’s little intelligence, and listen to me. There is life without love. It is not worth a bent penny, or a scuffed shoe. It is not worth the body of a dead dog nine days unburied. When you hear, a mile away and still out of sight, the churn of the water as it begins to swirl and roil, fretting around the sharp rocks—when you hear that unmistakable pounding—when you feel the mist on your mouth and sense ahead the embattlement, the long falls plunging and steaming—then row, row for your life toward it. please note: photo by Al Fasoldt

A day off after two days dealing with the sequelae of bad brains. We have a few young-uns as patients right now; perhaps harder on the younger nurses and docs since it hits so close to their own ages. Bumps up against that shield of invincibility they carry. For those of us with more years under our belts and wrapped around our waistlines it's easy to see these young victims of fate as our own kids. Their parents are even generally younger than me--I was a late mom, or as the medical terminology states, a "geriatric pregnancy"(...and I heard Hollywood was tough)--and the desire to care for and work towards a child's,albeit 18 or 19 years old, survival is deeply imprinted. At some point as I got older it became easier to commune with families caught in the limbo environment of the ICU quite simply because I can easily imagine how it feels. There but for the grace of God, go I. But, they're in someone else's hands today while I attempt to do something maternal f...

I'll tell you a half-dozen things that happened to me in Indiana when I went that far west to teach. You tell me if it was worth it. I lived in the country with my dog— part of the bargain of coming. And there was a pond with fish from, I think, China. I felt them sometimes against my feet. Also, they crept out of the pond, along its edges, to eat the grass. I'm not lying. And I saw coyotes, two of them, at dawn, running over the seemingly unenclosed fields. And once a deer, but a buck, thick-necked, leaped into the road just-oh, I mean just, in front of my car— and we both made it home safe. And once the blacksmith came to care for the four horses, or the three horses that belonged to the owner of the house, and I bargained with him, if I could catch the fourth, he, too, would have hooves trimmed for the Indiana winter, and apples did it, and a rope over the neck did it, so I won something wonderful; and there was, one morning, an owl flying, oh pale angel, into the hay loft o...

Blitz The Story Of December 29, 1940 by Margaret Gaskin I love this book and I want everyone to read it although I realize it's not everyone's cup of tea. It is literally one day out of months of nightly bombing raids conducted by the German Luftwaffe which presents a bit of a problem to write as there is no one particular character to follow. As you read, you follow the timeline of the raid itself, which was massive, and individual accounts from many sources. It took me a bit of time to read, partly because these days I've only been reading at night before bed and it's not too long before I'm asleep. The writing was somewhat difficult for me due to the style of the author. She must have a British style of the wording and the structure and rhythm of the sentences and I would have to re-read to get the gist of it. And the abbreviations...!!! Wartime England... Could not remember those from night to night, but it made no difference to the narrative. It was that intere...

Sometimes I wish I were still out on the back porch, drinking jet fuel with the boys, getting louder and louder as the empty cans drop out of our paws like booster rockets falling back to Earth and we soar up into the summer stars. Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead, bearing asteroids and mist, blind fish and old space suits with skeletons inside. On Earth, men celebrate their hairiness, and it is good, a way of letting life out of the box, uncapping the bottle to let the effervescence gush through the narrow, usually constricted neck. And now the crickets plug in their appliances in unison, and then the fireflies flash dots and dashes in the grass, like punctuation for the labyrinthine, untrue tales of sex someone is telling in the dark, though no one really hears. We gaze into the night as if remembering the bright unbroken planet we once came from, to which we will never be permitted to return. We are amazed how hurt we are. We would give anything for what we have.

and it was all downhill from there.

I told you once when we were young that we would someday meet again. Now, the years flown past, the letters unwritten, I am not so certain. It is autumn. There are toothaches hidden in this wind, there are those determined to bring forth winter at any cost. I am resigned to dark blonde shadows at stoplights, lost in the roadmaps of leaves which point in every direction at once. But I am wearing the shirt you stitched two separate lifetimes ago. It is old and falling to ash, yet every button blooms the flowers of your design. I think of this and I am happy, to have kissed your mouth with the force of language, to have spoken your name at all.

A Woman Feeding Gulls by David Wagoner They cry out at the sight of her and come flying Over the tidal flats from miles away, Sideslipping and wheeling In sloping gray-and-white interwoven spirals Whose center is her And the daily bread she casts downwind on the water While rising to spread her arms Like wings for the calling of still more gulls around her, Their cries intermingling at the end of daylight With the sudden abundance Of this bread returning after the hungry night And the famine of morning And the endlessly hungry opening and closing Of wings and arms and shore and the turning sky.

"Now the trumpet summons us again -- not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need; not as a call to battle, though embattled we are -- but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out, 'rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation' -- a struggle against the common enemies of man: tyranny, poverty, disease, and war itself." John F. Kennedy The Wild Swans at Coole by W.B.Yeats The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry, Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky; Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine and fifty swans. The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me Since I first made my count; I saw, before I had well finished, All suddenly mount And scatter wheeling in great broken rings Upon their clamorous wings. I have looked upon those brilliant creatures, And now my heart is sore. All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight, The first time on this shore, The bell-beat of their wings above m...

I (Heart) My Wife By Darlyn Finch "I (Heart) My Wife" the bumper sticker read in the window of the pickup truck ahead of me at the red light, and I burst into tears for no particular reason I could explain to the crossing guard on the corner or even to the man driving the truck, who looked quite ordinary, and did not realize those four happy words could rip a woman's heart out under certain circumstances, when she's one man's abscessed tooth, and another's dirty little secret. Then I stopped to wonder, as I blew my nose and wiped my eyes, whether the man had bought the bumper sticker at all, or if his wife had perhaps stuck it there, in the window behind his head, as a message to women like me, whom she surely knows are sitting at every red light in every town, wishing they could one day be someone's very best thing. And, while you're driving around town today, here's a sampling of some hometown favorites, Over the Rhine , from their new CD, the...

I know it's a crescent moon here in CinCity, but there must be a full moon somewhere shining its craziness over our way... You know, some people just ain't right.

Susan Love is looking for Healthy women to participate in research and look for an end to breast cancer in OUR lifetimes. One more thing we can do to help the women in our lives that we love. http://www.armyofwomen.org/ "Breast cancer affects one in eight women during their lives. Breast cancer kills more women in the United States than any cancer except lung cancer. No one knows why some women get breast cancer, but there a number of risk factors. Risks that you cannot change include * Age - the chance of getting breast cancer rises as a woman gets older * Genes - there are two genes, BRCA1 and BRCA2, that greatly increase the risk. Women who have family members with breast or ovarian cancer may wish to be tested. * Personal factors - beginning periods before age 12 or going through menopause after age 55 Other risks include being overweight, using hormone replacement therapy, taking birth control pills, drinking alcohol, not having children or having your first child after age...