1. Regardless of the year, it’s the first flower seen on my daily hikes, pushing through every November’s abandoned duvet of tan and umber — a patchwork of ash, oak…

Ingredients: 1 Partner 1 Child 4–6 years of age 1 Child 8–10 years of age 1 Set of Parents 1 Set of In-laws 1 Brother, spouse, and two teenage boys 1 Uncle Bob between 72 and 75 2 Cases of Mixed Five-Year Old French Bordeaux and Spanish Riojas, both white…

Strong impulse control means missing the blood moon of November, the Coho​ Salmon that just jumped the falls, and the tickling wind of March across bare skin. Gary D. Grossman One…

Five thirty AM, November eighth, and my yard owl, a barred male, has woken me with his high reverb “who cooks for me”, or perhaps it was the full moon, last night’s eclipse — looking like an abandoned pumpkin hanging on the black vine of sky — most likely it was the fall back to Standard Time…

The Quiet Rising before the sun I leave the bed softly, my beshert unstirred, then tread across our slate-blue Spanish floor, it’s breathe unseen in the dark. Every day yields thin sheets…

Bare Bones They stand in the knife-like light of the November moon. White and red oak, mockernut hickory, and yellow poplar — unclothed, their naked limbs reach for both sky and each other — touches…

CLOACAL KISS Mid-February and the red-tails and red-shoulders dance across the sky, shouting kiah, kiah birdtalk for “look at me, look at me”. A pick-up bar in a cobalt sky, with raptors circling and chanting “hey baby, hey…

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES Heading north to the western Blue Ridge — shielding California cousins from August in Georgia. Kids strapped in, we’re an hour down the road, when the afternoon thunderstorm rhumbas in, flexes twice, and spews three inches of soupy rain. Having driven this road for seventeen years, I’m on autopilot, then I notice…

SEMINOLE PUMPKIN Gardening twenty years, I’ve given up planting squash — all hope exhaled from years of deflated stems. Vine borers — like so much Old South — veneer of oaken courtesy — over a hollow, angry…