Patricia Wild’s Blog

Message Received
Every night for the past week or so, hours before dawn, a nearby robin begins to chirrup. And wakes me ...

One Small Step for Sisterhood
["My" Walgreen's; February 3, 2020] My husband and I have lost a step or two; we joke that soon we'll ...

Deep In My Heart I Do Believe
In 1966, I joined a handful of other Wheelock College seniors to research cultural opportunities for greater Boston children. We ...

Palabra means Word
On Mardi Gras, sensing I might find what I sought in a space unlike my unadorned meetinghouse, I attended evening ...

Thank you, Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF)
["You are Star Stuff" by Betsy Roper] Like many aging people, I sometimes struggle with insomnia. Anxious, depressed, fearful; it's ...

Why I Choked Up—Maybe
Yesterday, Martin Luther King Day +1, like many greater Bostonians, I made the pilgrimage to downtown's Boston Common to view ...

“And the days dwindle down . . . “
[It's been a loooong time since I last posted. So: hello, again.] Last week over lunch, a friend I've known ...

“Why Is This Okay?”
[Green Line tunnel] Recently, driving to the Minneapolis airport for the first time, my husband and I arrived at the ...

Comin’ Around Again
When I was young I was very young. And the world I grew up in was a younger world, a ...

To Have and To Hold
When I was maybe three or four, one of my favorite "toys" had been my mother's button box. (What was ...

This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
Last summer during a fierce heat wave, discovering Shannon Beach was a godsend. Pristine, beautiful, located on Mystic Lake in ...

“Just Roll With It”
[Turner's unfinished "Venice with the Salute"*] Yesterday, in the collective silence of a Quaker meeting, I waited for whatever was ...

“Intensified Sky”
[Bird at the edge of the Grand Canyon} I am currently going through an intense passage; Rilke's poem speaks to ...

“Love It All”
F. Scott Fitzgerald once wrote: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in ...

“Everywhere As Blue As Mine”
Recently, as bombs continue to hit civilian targets in Ukraine, someone posted this deeply moving video. The last time I'd ...

This I What We Do Now:
Last night at a Zoom worship group we were asked, "How has this pandemic affected your world view?" Um—yikes? In ...

“In My Ears”
Getting older sometimes means you think you remember things—but then again, do you, really? As in being told my beloved ...

Through the Ether
My father were be astonished. Self-labeled "a merchant of death,"during the Cold War my definitely-analog dad sold General Electric-manufactured heavy military ...

In Honor of Dr. King:
I haven't posted for a while because I've been working on other writing projects. But today, serendipitously, as we honor ...

“Land Acknowledgement Day”?
This year at my house, Thanksgiving Day will look pretty normal. Our menu will feature indigenous entrees like cranberries, corn, squash, maybe ...

Lean Back, (Lean In)
Who shows up for a climate justice demonstration in Boston's Back Bay on a Friday afternoon? Its organizers,* students, and ...

Light A Candle
[Mom's 95th birthday party, Neville Center, Cambridge, MA, 2018] This has been a week of anniversaries: my mother died three ...

Serendipity
[An excerpt from Strands: An Apprenticeship with Grief and Loss, to be published by Barclay Press, 2022.] In January of 2020, the ...