Walking with you is like this. We find things. Once we found a coyote skull. Once porcelain pottery fragments, old bottles, and buckshot. Once a wooden boat, hidden in huckleberry. That was decades ago, near a mountain lake, where there once was a summer camp. The boat was nearly smashed into the ground by snow…
Category: creative nonfiction
This Mountain
We live at the base of So-Bahli- Ahli. Lofty lady. It’s the name local tribes gave the mountain that presides over the living here in our far-flung corner of the Pacific Northwest. The valley of the Stillaguamish. This was before the settlers came and the farmer that lost his horse. The mountain that was once…
Swan
We debate what kind. Trumpeter or Tundra? Juvenile? Why alone here with the mergansers and mallards? We notice the shape of the beak. The nudge of orange. The grey rolling down the narrow neck and onto her back. Like dirty snow. Or clouded sky. The wonderous wings unfurl and spread every now and again. I…
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