Sledgehammer

Destruction feels good, knocking away detritus, cobwebbed shingles, rotted wood. We understand now how the house got away from her. Neglect tells stories, reveals pain. So we slam the iron fist hammer to clear hurt, loss, and damage to rebuild a  porch, a place to enter our new home that is being torn asunder bit […]

Trevor

Our turtle, Trevor by decree, greets our friends on the stairs leading down to our future garden. By nature slow, in water, buoyed by salt and waves, turtles are weightless. Years ago, shoulders heavy from my lost mother, in Hawaii’s warm blue, a turtle rose up to greet me and floated there. I’m still, eyes […]

Nightlight

A beacon for houses, the nightlight is a safe passage to our front door. If one feels at sea, find our house, the one on the corner, with the cracks, failing plumbing, electric wires haphazard in their power. Know our light will not go out, despite admonishments that renovation is hard, the challenges will pull […]

Stucco

Lines like roads etch the stucco. our house’s face a roadmap of weather: rain, wind, sun, and today, this fog. Fog against the windows, in the eaves, sun just breaking through. We question whether to demolish and strip away the years, or patch and repair, leaving the history, and the roads traveled, as proud reminders […]

Leaf

A map of the world contained in a leaf, structures of democracies and dictatorships, declining governments and birthing nations. The world’s backbone reaches up and out; tiny tendrils of hope and life dissipate from it. The root of all life breathes in and out. We tore down trees whose scale and care were shopworn; reforestation […]