The day after Valentine’s Day one bouquet of roses rises tall on my kitchen counter (the long-stems). The shorter-stems reside on a refrigerator shelf, extending their life (shelf life?) and making me glad everytime I open the refrigerator door.
Mother shooed us into the cellar. I turned my pockets inside out and showed her my discoveries. While we waited for the storm to pass, my mother told us stories: saints’ bones preserved in crypts of faraway cathedrals; healers who told the future by throwing bones as if they were dice; and air-raid cellars in…
Post Pinnacle by Linda Jones Hawkins © January 2008 I now have love Tucked sweetly on my pillowslip It enfolds me It comforts me It sustains me And it delights me, I arise knowing my journey Has been stretched a bit more To accommodate his girth and gentle Kind of loving. I now move through…
February is here, that month of hearts burning to burnish romantic love relationships. What if February became a month celebrating all types of love? Why not send Valentine’s cards to everyone, not just our sweetie, as we used to do in grade school? Ernest Dempsey, a.k.a. Karim Khan, our Man from Pakistan, sent me the…
In honor of the combination of Black History Month and Valentine’s Day week, I’m running a “Black Valentine” series to profile several of the most vibrant Black couples I’ve met in St. Louis. I met Carlos and Sylvia Jenkins at the Missouri History Museum evening featuring Ron Himes. Carlos and Sylvia run CJS Vision 500,…
“Just as language has no longer anything in common with the thing it names, so the movements of most of the people who live in cities have lost their connection with the earth; they hang, as it were, in the air, hover in all directions, and find no place where they can settle.” —Rainer Maria…
We cannot direct the wind, but we can adjust the sails. ~Bertha Calloway, Founder of the Great Plains Black Museum