DOWN BY THE OLD MOTEL

The same family since 1941 ran the little grocery and general store which had its last day on August 30 th , 2022. It’s not the family’s fault, not at all, it’s just circumstance. The clerks have been very sad—people who have worked in the store for many years—and they’ve told me that customers have been crying.  They get teary while talking about it themselves. It’s a plain little store, but one that is so familiar to everyone in town that it’s more like a relative than a place of business. Every dark knot in the wooden ceiling is familiar to everyone, and it was always much more than a grocery. There was the tiny post office, a good selection of everything and all kinds of things beyond that, and if there was something one wanted, they would try to get it. They always had good local produce, they’d have organic tomatoes, good local dairy, and fruit from the farmlands a few hours away.  I think of my mother weighing grapes on the little old scale in the produce section, and I can pict

This wee house sparrow came every day for two weeks to visit our little house by the ocean. I named her Lina and fed her crushed peanuts. She did not have a long life, but she did have a sweet life that had in it flying, love, admiration, peanuts, and adventure. I watched her zoom from the rooftop to the tops of the pine trees on her pretty little wings. Around this house there are seagulls, crows, bluejays, starlings, hummingbirds, and doves. Sometimes a falcon comes. Lina could fly straight up, and she could coast straight down, from the roof to the little garden where the peanuts were. When she was injured, most likely by another bird, she let me catch her. I took her in a shoebox to a man every bit her equal in sweetness, a man who cares for injured shore birds, and he did his best to help her. None of the cats who live in  the wooded places here by the sea had the chance to bother her, which is something to be thankful for. I hope she will get another chance at this place, maybe a