I love writing Sunday Passages. Sometimes I wonder if you read
them...although I get lots of small notes back, which I love, by the way.

I remember the day it started. I was sitting with my wonderful friend Amy on
the beach at St. Pete. It was four years ago. My divorce was only a couple
of years earlier, my children had left home to seek fame and fortune (or at
least rent money!) and there I was. I remember telling her that my kids didn't
know my favorite color...or that I worked as a barmaid in Germany for a
summer...they didn't know that I had studied Russian..they didn't know that I get
lonely or sad...they didn't know that when I was 9 years old my neighborhood
friend, Roger, fell out of a cherry tree and broke his arm following a storm
while we were watching a beautiful rainbow in the tree. They did know that I was
a good Mom...that I baked great bread...loved music and flowers...and that I
believed in the power of stories.

It was on that afternoon that I decided to write to them every week so they
would get to know me a little better. Maybe it is for myself that I write.
Maybe it is myself I am getting to know and my children were the excuse to write
and write publicly. I do tell it all. Some of you have been with me for
four years...from the cottage to the house...from chaos to calmness back to
confusion....from alone to coupled to alone again.

Most of my passages have to do with filtered raindrops in spring...the snow
of winter...the colors of autumn....trips to Scotland, Tennessee, Oregon,
Ocracoke......Poetry of Emily Dickinson..Mary Oliver...James Whitcomb Riley.

Tonight again I sit on my porch (pizer, deck, sunroom, stoop) with
neighborhood sounds of night voices of crickets and cars..yellow splotches of lights in
windows..the scent of my vanilla candle and red wine. It is so peaceful...yet
my metaphoric shelf of words and thoughts is rich and stirred. I have spent
the week (until yesterday morning) lobbying by phone and email to preserve the
ban on the assault rifles...I marched in the 9/11 candle light vigil, I have
filled a notebook with reasons why not to shop at Walmart (you guessed it, I
don't go there..check out today's blog site for those reasons!!!), I fret often
over the presence and force of the hurricanes for small businesses and folks
who can't afford the gas to drive away....I work daily at school trying to
teach children to love learning....and to be present in the moment, and I am
trying to live my life as a salt shaker without the pepper. Oh, I still work out
at the gym, bake cookies, have my neighborhood potluck, drive my jeep (please
GB, don't drill in Alaska!), wear bangle bracelets with long skirts, mow and
trim my yard. Maybe the lack of TV in my life lets in these thoughts in and
gives them room to grow..maybe living alone gives me time to let these thoughts
in.

I do know this. What would I do if I did not have all of you to write
to...to unburden my soul...share the color of leaves..the depth of the snow..the
things I love. I leave you with one of my favorite E.D. poems..I know I have
shared it before, but tonight it means so much to me. With love to all, Lou Ann

This is my letter to the World
That never Wrote to Me--
The simple News that Nature told--
With tender Magesty.