These are blog posts by or about Lee Ann.
April may be the cruelest month, according to T.S. Eliot. But January is definitely the longest. It’s a wintry, gray, wet slog. How do you make it even longer? Sign up for Dry January. I experienced a pretty “wet” December; we had some gatherings with neighbors, and I drank much more wine than usual. I also discovered the Maker’s Mark Old Fashioned while on vacation in Nashville. All…
When I wake up, I think about 4,500 words. When I am working out. When I am watching TV. When I am eating a meal, which is usually contemporaneous with watching TV. They don’t write themselves, you know. As the week goes on, I add up the cumulative number of words written. Am I ahead? Behind? Right on schedule? Because on Saturday, I have to upload 4,500 words…
Part 1 of an occasional series. At 66, I don’t have any major regrets. The closest thing to an Official Major Regret is never writing that novel percolating inside me. And now I am about to at least write it, as a graduate student in the Master of Fine Arts program at Drexel University. Graduate school at my age is probably noteworthy enough to blog about. No creative…
Music – so-called Christian “praise” music at that – is turning out to be a spiritual lifeline of sorts these days. I did not see that one coming. About a year ago, I announced a break from Christianity, the institution. Over that period, we attended our church a handful of times under COVID conditions – outdoors, with masks, and no singing until that brief respite in July. It…
My family is fragmented, and the most immediate members of it are and were broken in many ways. My father, and his father, were scoundrels at best . . . I won’t go into what they were at worst. At any rate, dysfunction caused me to not care, rather belligerently, about my family roots. When I saw people gleefully discovering their history on Ancestry.com, I scoffed. Who cares?…
I am taking a sabbatical from Christianity. And I think Jesus will understand. There are many reasons, and I am not proselytizing you to join me. The bottom line is I believe the net effect of Christianity over the course of history, including American history, is negative. Even evil. Not just the Crusades and the Inquisition. More recent history: Manifest Destiny and genocide. Slavery and Jim Crow. Hatred…
The yellow house on shore stayed in the same spot, and I had been watching it for what seemed like an eternity as I struggled to reach Tower Beach on Rehoboth Bay. The swells on open water were rougher than I had ever faced. The dark clouds were threatening and the wind blew right at us. The shore never seemed to be getting any closer. At that point,…
At the beginning of 2020, pre-pandemic, I set a reading goal in Goodreads of 20 books. That may not sound like a lot, but if you read with moving lips like I do – constantly referring to maps and Googling people and events – it is a respectable aspiration. At the beginning of June, according to Goodreads, I was “three books ahead of schedule.” I decided June would…
Certain determined creatures don’t know there is a pandemic out there. They flit around in the understory or perch on tree limbs, foraging and pecking and standing out in their fine yellow, blue and red plumage. They trill and squawk and sing cheerily. When they are feeling magnanimous, they will sit patiently while I set up my tripod and focus my long lens on them. I have always…
Please see trip photographs on our portfolio site and video at end of post. We could hear the Colorado River long before we actually saw it, the relentless clash of water and rocks. We were descending Cathedral Wash, a puzzle of multiple levels of ledges and drop-offs, including one called The Pit. Many of us agreed that we would have turned around when we came to the first…
There are a few places on earth where I feel like my soul is at home. Where the psychic roots run deep, my DNA is buzzing contentedly, and I always feel a welcome familiarity no matter how long I have been gone. One of those places is the Texas Hill Country, land of my mother’s clan and a rocky, rolling landscape of cedar, winding creeks and limestone bungalows.…