Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Linda Parsons

Life and Love on “The Rock”

Our visit to Alcatraz opened my eyes and heart

My daughter didn’t go to Alcatraz willingly. She grumbled the whole way, punctuating the morning with sarcasm: “Yay, it’s prison day!” Perhaps she was right — what purpose did it serve to see this horrific chapter of history?

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Fall Diptych

Meditations on a season

I want to notice the moment everything changes, like the subtle shift in daylight, when what was impossibly bright is now a smaller, deeper dark coming on.

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Fertile Ground for Art

Suzanne Stryk’s The Middle of Somewhere travels outward and inward

Suzanne Stryk’s The Middle of Somewhere leads us through mosquito clouds and dusty barns, inviting us to witness flow and change, the endangered and the enduring, the gone and the going away.

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Visible Signs

I’m looking for whatever support comes along, earthly and otherworldly

I’m a believer in synchronicity: one sighting begets another — the more you see, the more you get — like these spiraled pearls outside my door just as summer ends, on the cusp of bittersweetness when losses cut deeper in autumn, bleed into the brilliant dying back.

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Messenger

Moving past sadness and old hopes

I needed a messenger this morning, in the kitchen where my former mate and I had shared meals and talk for 24 years. He had passed 5 days before of a heart attack.

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Nesting

On the mystery of mothering

This spring, thinning my garden beds overfull with hellebores, the early- and long-blooming Lenten rose, I accidently exposed a rabbit’s nest. It was the first I’d ever seen. I gently pulled back the top layer of gray fluff — then the scream. A humanlike scream of innermost fear.

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