"My great-aunt Alice, Miss Rumphius, is very old now. Her hair is very white. Every year there are more and more lupines. Now they call her the Lupine Lady. Sometimes my friends stand with me outside her gate, curious to see the old, old lady who planted the fields of lupines. When she invites us in, they come slowly. They think she is the oldest woman in the world. Often she tells us stories of faraway places.
"When I grow up," I tell her, "I too will go to faraway places and come home to live by the sea."
"That is all very well, little Alice," says my aunt, "but there is a third thing you must do."
"What is that?" I ask.
"You must do something to make the world more beautiful."
"All right," I say.
But I do no know yet what that will be.

Tuesday, October 7, 2014

Fall

“The land is settling into an easy evening, and into that season where everything that has risen up prepares to fade and fall, this death blanketing last year’s death.  The land is at ease with the idea of mortality.  But the sky...cumulonimbus clouds are stacked and banked to the stratosphere, and the lowering sun has bronzed and brassed and blushed them.  These are clouds that make you long for wings.  
-Michael Perry, author, Wisconsin-ite, father, nurse

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