In the week preceding Easter, journeys with friends reminded me of the joys of childhood’s egg hunts. On these adult expeditions, we searched for–and found–secret glories which we could have easily missed. My friend Betty and I delighted in finding the cross vine pictured below and the happy turtles pictured above at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in […]
Last week a friend phoned and asked, “Do you have any time left?” At least, that’s how I heard it at first. And thought–Gee, I hope so. Then I chuckled to myself when I realized what she actually said and meant was, “Do you have any thyme left?” Her own patch had faded, and, a […]
Poking around Routt County, Colorado (shown above) last week, my husband and I ran across this chalked message on the sidewalk of the beautiful public trail along the Yampa River: It reads, “What if the hokey pokey really is what it’s all about?” When I read it, I laughed aloud. And maybe that is an important […]
Something unexpected happens when these two seemingly very similar butterflies, shown above sharing a coneflower in my Texas hill country garden, open their wings. When it unfolds, the one on the left in the photo above reveals through its stained-glass pattern that it is a monarch: The one pictured on the right in the photo […]
My paternal grandmother enticed squirrels close to her house: she tied a shallow tin can in the hackberry tree next to the side porch with a piece of baling wire, put a few shelled pecans in, and waited patiently inside the window, her .22 caliber rifle lying across her calico-aproned lap. No squirrels were going […]
One cannot help but be in awe when one contemplates the . . . marvelous structure of reality. — Albert Einstein A handsome dragonfly–a widow skimmer, I believe–is gracing my garden these days. It has been much too quick for me and my camera; dragonflies are such excellent fliers that aviation engineers research them hoping […]
Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience. –Ralph Waldo Emerson Among my perennials, several plants worry me each spring by not showing up on time. That is, they don’t show up when I think they should; I fret that they must have frozen during the winter and won’t be returning at all. So when […]
If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water. –Loren Eiseley Here in the Texas hill country on this May Saturday morning, it’s been raining off and on for the past thirty hours or so. The forecast for the next few hours is for more thunderstorms, so I zipped outside just now […]
Prickly pear cactus blooms always remind me of my mother. They seem to flower here in the Texas hill country around Mother’s Day every year, and they’ve been coloring the landscape with their sunny faces this week: After I became an adult, when I would visit my mother–before she started the long Alzheimer’s decline toward […]
(such a sky and such a sun i never knew and neither did you and everybody never breathed quite so many kinds of yes) –E. E. Cummings The past week in the Texas hill country was one of noticing new life in progress: two pairs of scissortail flycatchers flying in front of me as […]
Studies in Color and Composition
Radical Retirement
A Glimpse into My Life & Passions
Joann Pensabene
Where observation and imagination meet nature in poetry.
pursuing a life of purpose
Writing our way to awareness
Living life outside the lines
A Story Circle Network blog for and by women
A Diary of Love, Literature, and Growing Up in Wartime America
Practicing Wonder 