Emily Brisse

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands; How could I answer the child? . . . I do not know what it is any more than he. I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven. Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord, A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped, Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose? Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . . the produced babe of the vegetation. Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic, And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones, Growing among black folks as among whites, Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves. -- Walt Whitman lines 90-101 from Leaves of Grass

Hi everybody, Hope this finds you some place warm, although that's unlikely, as so much of the U.S. has been plunged these last months deepdeep into unending Polar Vorti (plural for vortex?). So cold! So much snow! I haven't seen drifts like this since I was a young girl passing through the prairie town of Marshall, Minnesota, staring out the car window open-mouthed at snow blown as high as rooftops. We have been making lots of soup and drinking lots of tea, and I have given up on professional shoes and wear boots to work. This chill, though, does have its benefits, namely its insistence that one curl up under covers once the  baby  toddler has gone to sleep and read ones way through stacks of books. This is my story season. The outside world may be a white canvas, but the color these pages take me to. In this time of my life of no to  Costa Rican road trips , words can be wheels and wings, both.  Books: Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez --A perfect pairing with this season.