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You absolutely must listen to Malcolm Guite discuss the poem and read it to fully enjoy this autumnal experience. Life has been too full to write, but the three minutes you spend on this post will be well worth your time as we celebrate my favorite season of…
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Personally, I love the look of gabion retaining walls, but the work of filling them can be exhausting. We had a lot of bricks and old paving stones to begin the process, leaving the nicer looking landscape rocks for the visible sides. But when you have nearly twenty-two…
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One of the joys of being a teacher lies in the different duties we absorb to fill up any free time we might waste preparing lessons or grading student work. Of course that’s not really the case; we all have duties to perform. It’s just hard, sometimes, when…
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Many poets speak of the challenge of being a poet, but few have captured the sense of being out of place and misunderstood like Richard Wilbur in his translation of Charles Baudelaire’s stunning poem from “The Flowers of Evil.” My wife shared it with me tonight, having heard…
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The fragility of life surrounds us. It’s easy to numb ourselves to it or be inoculated by fleeting pleasures. But the reality of death remains. Does that mean I spend all my time living in despair, fearing the quiet feet of death? Of course not. Life is beautiful…
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On the eve of beginning my twenty-fifth year as a teacher, I am reminded of Billy Collins, looking back on a long career in the following poem. I haven’t taken the time to total all the students I’ve taught over the years, but I’m sure they would populate…
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We interrupt this pizza night to bring you a special guest: a Cooper’s Hawk. Admittedly, I’m not 100% sure that our visitor was a Cooper’s Hawk. My fellow writer and friend James and I spent part of our most recent Dunkin’ Drafting evening searching allaboutbirds.org trying to identify…
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Saturday afternoon, my youngest son and I were preparing to powerwash our porch furniture before dressing them in a fresh coat of Hunter Green paint. As I struggled to remove the nozzle from the hose, two moles popped out of the ground at the top of the stone…
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There’s something that draws me to hawks. And yet, this morning a hawk was drawn to our side porch! Admittedly, I know exactly why the hawk chose to hang out on the corner post overlooking my neighbor’s lawn: baby rabbits. We’d been watching their furtive movements around the…
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Six years after beginning my constellations project, it is finished. I completed “Orion” on April 4, 2018; I finished Aries on June 24, 2024. Now that the compilation is complete, I’ll be turning my attention to developing shows around each of the three EPs I have planned around…
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the deepening ground 