a writers folly...

I bought it on a trip to Paris.

I was blocked. Staring at blank paper day after day, week after week.

What better inspiration to write stories and poems than with an extraordinary pen purchased in this
city, home to so many great writers.

Voltaire
Victor Hugo
Jules Verne
Simone de Beauvoir
Ernest Hemingway
and Gertrude Stein to name but a few.

And so I bought the pen.

I'd seen it in the window of a stationary store on my walks to and from the café every morning.

It beckoned me toward the window with it's intricate silver design.

I'd managed to admire it in passing for days, but now it was becoming an obsession.

I broke down and bought the pen.

It was extravagant and expensive but with a pen like this one could, no, one must write wonderful stories.

It is seven years later;

I was cleaning out a drawer and there was the pen.

Still in it's box.

Upon my arrival back home all those years ago, I had tried to use the pen but it was too heavy and
bulky. Too difficult to write with easily.

And so it was retired to the drawer.

Never used to write the masterpiece it was meant to write.

Maybe I'll try it again, who knows...

found objects...

I found it in a thrift shop.
Fine bone china big enough to hold gallons of coffee on the toughest days and a single serving of oatmeal on cold winter mornings.

It holds hot lemon tea with honey when I'm sick.
Coffee on normal days.
When I'm writing it's right beside me holding caffeine and critiques.
Over the years it's held change and flower petals, candy canes and crayons.
The day it breaks I will cry...

Helen's hats...



In the corner of her bedroom sat an old wicker chair she'd picked up at a garage sale.

It was what sat on that chair I had come looking for...

Three floral hat boxes stacked one atop the other like they had been for all the years I could remember.

They contained my aunts most prized possessions.

Three wonderful hats she had acquired over the years.

One had been rescued from a thrift store in the nineteen seventies.

The red one was a souvenir from Paris in the late fifties.

And the black one had belonged to my mother.

Everyone else had already rummaged through her house and belongings. Picking through her life like scavengers.

Those who had come before had absconded with her jewelry and china and anything else they had deemed valuable.

Helen would have laughed at their notion of valuable and hid that laugh behind her hand to hide her crooked teeth...I loved that laugh.

I left the house with the hat boxes and a smile, wearing the red hat.