Emily Brisse

Dear everyone, It is early December, and after a memorably beautiful and mild autumn where the leaves all but blazed out our windows, we had our first snow storm of the season early this week. The subsequent stretch of 40' days, though, turned the white quickly to water.  Which  is kind of how this season has felt for me. Things happen. And then all evidence of them is gone. And you wonder if you just blinked or were instead in some kind of truly beautiful but exhausting dream. My husband and I talk a lot about the pace of our lives, whether it's healthy, how we could slow down, what we might take out. It's hard because we could make different choices: live in a smaller house, live in a smaller town, have one of us--me, probably--stay home to tend the home and this darling small child we've welcomed into this busy world. But we've come to love our house. And we like where we live. And my job, though it is incredibly demanding, fills me up and up and up (everyday...

At almost four in the afternoon, the wind picks up and sifts through the golden woods. The tree trunks bronze and redden, branches on fire in the heavy sky that flickers with the disappearing sun. I wonder what I owe the fading day, why I keep my place at this dark desk by the window measuring the force of the wind, gauging how long a certain cloud will hold that pink edge that even now has slipped into gray? Quickly the lights are appearing, a lamp in every window and nests of stars on the rooftops. Ladders lean against the hills and people climb, rung by rung, into the night. -- by Joyce Sutphen

It is so quiet, I hear the second-hand on the kitchen clock ticking. There goes an airplane overhead, somewhere up there in the sky, a hundred people belted in, dozing, reading, shifting, catapulting through the night. It is 54'. It is autumn. This is always the season for me: the one where I seek out the still places in the day, listen for the silence. What I really want is to pull out my old sleeping bag, lay it down upon a hill, and climb in, stare up, watch how minutely and inevitably everything changes. I don't want to miss it. I know that I will. Suddenly all the leaves are on the ground. Tonight, just before dinner, I slipped on a fleece and some gloves and dug little holes around the garden. Yesterday a friend's mother snapped off the tops of a flowering sedum, gave them to me, and said, "Plant them, like this, upside down." So I did, tucking those starbursts of purple into bed the way I do my child: tenderly, patting tight the blanket, hopeful for...

Good morning, (And an early morning it is.) Last spring I could blame these sleepless a.m. hours on the turkeys roosting in the trees outside my window, but now I only have my swirling mind to point to. These are some of the things I would like/need to do, possibly today: transplant several hostas, dig up and move a good many big rocks, water the rudbeckia, move the shelves in the garage, organize the garage (!), call the insurance company, clip the little guy's fingernails, keep writing that essay, start writing college recommendations, finish rereading The Glass Castle, and oh (!) take in that sunrise. That list will be a starting point, anyway. And much of it will keep me outside, in the air that has already taken on a hint of autumn.  It's an exciting time of year, friends. Often stressful. But so very full of a pulsing, thrumming, chirping, calling, rushing, crunching, thrusting kind of life. Summer, as always, was a sweet reprieve where instead of teaching I spent ...

Hidden, oh hidden in the high fog the house we live in, beneath the magnetic rock, rain-, rainbow-ridden, where blood-black bromelias, lichens, owls, and the lint of the waterfalls cling, familiar, unbidden. In a dim age of water the brook sings loud from a rib cage of giant fern; vapor climbs up the thick growth effortlessly, turns back, holding them both, house and rock, in a private cloud. At night, on the roof, blind drops crawl and the ordinary brown owl gives us proof he can count: five times--always five-- he stamps and takes off after the fat frogs that, shrilling for love, clamber and mount. House, open house to the white dew and the milk-white sunrise kind to the eyes, to membership of silver fish, mouse, bookworms, big moths; with a wall for the mildew's ignorant map; darkened and tarnished by the warm touch of the warm breath, maculate, cherished; rejoice! For a later era will differ. (O difference that kills or intimidates, much of all our small shadowy life!) Without ...

 So, as I've mentioned here previously, we bought a fixer-upper this past spring. Where the house is quickly becoming one of my favorite characters (the unpredictable and quirky type), it is the land (of course) that has already merged with whatever voice I might use to write about it. One rainy morning, and it is all sanctuary and joy.  Hope you are relishing your summers, friends!

Good morning, It it raining here, lightly, and the view out my window is an ecstatic shaking green. I am three floors up, and yet I do not see the sky, I do not see the ground: just trunks and branches and leaves, close and middling and deep. What a scene to wake to! As ridiculous as these last months have been, these trees are saving me. Have saved me. Are already old friends.  I see now I'm going to have to write about them. Later. Soon. Graduation for the seniors tonight. And then: summer. Spring was a new house. A new roof. New floors and carpets and paint and cabinet liner and drawer pulls and towels. It was so much more space, these large open rooms that echoed even with our whispers. It was windows, light streaming in through the then bare branches. It was one holy morning when the buds popped open, and everywhere was suddenly yellow green and green yellow and holy holy holy. It was worrying about an old house with holes and trusting a new world so very able to fill it...

When I was a June twenty-two, one week fresh from graduation, I took a flight to Lubbock and wore cowboy hats with friends as young and sweet as grass. One night we put on skirts and tall boots and ambled through the halls  of an old restaurant, bourbon and whiskey  in glasses, all very kin to cigars  and mustaches, dark with ranch wood. The stars would be bright, the moon uncommonly full in that wide sky, so we stepped outside, a slight chill wrapping down our boots and around our ankles, expecting Texas. Instead, the screams of a child-- two children? more?--broke the twilight, and I gaped up--up, for they were in the trees,  perched and wailing at the coming dark, pleading in a language I couldn't decipher. “Peacocks,” a man said, amused, thumb in his pocket. I know because I stared at him in astonishment. Pressed pants. No belt buckle. Thin tie. No cowboy hat. Peacocks in trees, their tail feathers draped ...

Hi all, This one will be short on descriptions, but long on heart. What I mean is: I have never been so busy in my life. What I mean is: the winter is cold, work is great, my son is beautiful, family is important, sleep is restless, and the lists are miles and miles long. Don't be mistaken -- this is all our doing, whether consciously or not. You see, we've gone and bought a house. A fixer-upper. We close tomorrow.  It's all about to get very very interesting. So, friends, that, among many other reasons, is why I've spent less time here recently. However, it cheers me to know I can come back whenever I feel the desire. Like today. Like right now, as I type these letters into words and press publish, as I share something of my life, and genuinely hope you do the same. Below is what I've been into these last three months (when I wasn't creating lessons and grading essays and signing documents and filing taxes and contacting contractors and building the big...

One Tuesday afternoon, a month or so ago, I lay stretched out on my bed, my not-quite-two-year-old son cuddled between my arm and body, reading poetry aloud. " Before I was sixteen / I was fast / enough to fake / my shadow out," I read. "The instructor said, / Go home and write / a page tonight. / And let that page come out of you-- / Then, it will be true." "Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--" I placed my lips against the feverish brow of my boy, my fingers running along the length of his arm, reading over the top of my worry. Reading because the sound had soothed him, had taken him away from the limbs of his discomfort. Reading. [... And speaking of reading, you can read the rest at Mamalode. ]

May your new year be full of adventure and clarity. (And lots of reading, writing, big hopes, simple dreams, and chocolate.) xo from the north shore of Minnesota!