Chapter 16
A Community of Tennessee Writers, Readers & Passersby

Linda Parsons

Love Bites

The healing chugs on, even as grief sometimes circles back

I thought, how ironic, these gashes in my lower cheek and chin, hot and throbbing, my face a surprised welt I knew would scar, the left no longer my good side, a fitting present as I enter my “invisible” elder years more fully.

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Divinity

Sometimes an actual goodbye is beside the point

Who am I to deny this nod from the Universe, this spark of divinity made flesh? I took the small miracle and held it in my hands like a caramel sweet enough to hurt my teeth.

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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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