Daydreaming on the Porch
by Oswego
Entries 525
Page 4 of 21
The power of memories that come from the deepest, farthest places within us
In the life of each of us, I said to myself, there is a place remote and islanded, and given to endless regret or secret happiness. Sarah Orne Jewett Until we learn the lessons inherent in unple...
What is friendship, really?
…Although friendships tend to change as people age, there is some consistency in what people want from them. “I’ve listened to someone as young as 14 and someone as old as 100 talk about their c...
The loneliest sound on earth is a train whistle in the night. From an online journal It’s not the who, what and where memories I savor from my childhood. My small village of Bellmore, N.Y., had...
The following is an excerpt from a writer who regularly challenges my own worldview and beliefs. This is a good thing, for it means that I am not mentally stagnating, but exploring and taking in...
“Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?” Indeed I do As the years pass without a visit back to the city where I was born and lived for the first 21 years of my life, I tend to think of i...
Flash back to the end of summer, 2017, one of those fatefully significant years in my life. I had retired only a few months before, and I was having a hard time feeling connected with people s...
A Tale of Two Rooming Houses
When you’re starting out on the long and winding road to the future, as when you have just graduated from college and moved away from your hometown, you generally are not too well off. What to d...
Few plants give us what the Crape Myrtle does, a myriad of foliage colors in the spring, a virtual kaleidoscope of flower colors from summer into the fall, an array of fall leaf colors from all s...
Sand castles and endless, carefree summers at the beach
Heat waves stretching across large parts of the globe are straining power grids and shutting businesses that can’t keep their workers cool. Some of the hardest-hit areas will face hotter temperat...
I am impatient these days: there is not time enough in this one llife. I need more lives; I have made plans already for three or four. I could easily expand to ten or twenty, all full-flavored...
I look back many years ago to when I was a child, and I recall there was nothing that quite fascinated me as much as images in a kaleidoscope I had at one time. I must have been 8, I’m not sure w...
The spiritual life is a long and winding road, for sure, with many twists and turns, dead ends and forked paths. But steadily following the main road will bring you to the place where the veil is...
Photography is the simultaneous recognition, in a fraction of a second, of the significance of an event as well as of a precise organization of forms which give that event its proper expression. ...
Have you ever realized just how much fences, gates and walls reveal about the builders and owners of the property enclosed within? I certainly have. I’ve always been drawn to, and fascinated by ...
Some of you may remember “The Cowsills,” whose hilariously captivating version of “Hair” from the famed musical by the same name in the late Sixties, catapulted the family to fame, leading to an...
The heart hath its own memory like the mind, And in it are enshrined The precious keepsakes into which is wrought The giver’s loving thought. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Music touches every ...
Every Mother’s Day is difficult for those who’ve lost a loved one they cherished and who brought them into this world. For me there is special anguish mixed with love and gratitude. I had a moth...
Aging moderately, if not gracefully
There are scientific studies, performed by real rsearchers in white lab coats, purporting to show that people over 50 do not actually suffer much memory loss, that our ability to store and retrie...
It’s been almost a year since the biggest de-cluttering and emptying experience my life occurred, and only because we sold my mother’s house, where I had also lived for ten years while taking car...
Many driven and anxious people with highly ambitious and often unrealistic goals, constantly strive to be better and more successful than others. To me this is a classic sign of dysfunction in o...
Now’s not the time
The beach was strange that night. A rather weak cold front was pushing through, but didn’t know when or whether to sweep out to sea. So it was sunny and partly cloudy one minute, and then raining...
I recently read a beautiful and evocative essay about a walk during which the writer discovered a tiny stream and a house and garden that filled her with delight and awe. Cherry blossoms made it...
I went out to my brother’s place at the beach for our weekly ritual of Sunday supper together. We all did a good job of not broaching the fact that his cat, Chloe, whom we all loved so much, wou...
Photography lets you explore with your inner eye
Photography is fascinating to me because it’s both descriptive and symbolic at the same time. Descriptive because it shows you something that looks like the world and symbolic because the best ph...
Spring makes the world come alive, and I’m so grateful
O world, I cannot hold thee close enough! Thy winds, thy wide grey skies! Thy mists, that roll and rise! Thy woods …that ache and sag And all but cry with colour… …Long have I known a glory in it...
Book Description
Short essays from the interior of my life.