I took piano lessons in an old building on the fringes of downtown McKeesport, Pennsylvania. “Progressive Music” the place was called. The lower level sold equipment – sheet music, reeds, cases and no doubt instruments themselves. The upper level had…

Beauty as Truth Of all the shocks from Hitler’s Germany of 1933, the one that cut Agatha the deepest was Germany’s withdrawal from the League of Nations. She was packing and sorting when she heard. The announcement on the radio…

Things went down for Gail - fast. Everyone saw it, she was no longer the working ranch woman who never seemed to get dirty driving hay equipment, castrating calves, rounding up cattle from horseback on the range. Impossibly, her jeans…

And there is something beautiful about absolutely every single thing in existence. Beauty soothes us.

“Beauty as Truth.” It’s a quotation from John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” The ending is: Beauty is Truth, truth beauty;/ That is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.” Well. There certainly is a…

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(Note: I'm using this to work on a revision of my novel in progress. This is one of the characters.) “Hear that?” Sarah’s voice pulled me from the deep place I’d been since my head hit the pillow. I’d spent…

“Hard winds crack my core,” the man said to me. I’d agreed to meet him at Novy, a local restaurant I frequent a great deal, an innocuous enough spot. “I’ve endured a great deal of wind and weather,” he said.…

Is there any dispute? That the hardest wind we must all endure is Death? I’ve endured much loss in my life, but it all happened so incrementally, spread out through my life so I barely noticed the impact of all…

Write Beauty into Being. May 10, 1940. Great Britain’s new prime minister, Winston Churchill was sworn in. For the last eight months, Great Britain and German traded bombs, destroying military targets. This day, Churchill gave the order to bomb civilians.…

Suddenly, the other girls in my class dressed sexier, took much more care with mascara and eye liner and flirted with boys. Their parents even let them go on dates with boys. Wanda, Sally and I were not there yet,…