A certain doubleness, by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another.

— Henry David Thoreau

I know this “doubleness”
the dark of one, and
light of other

and the distance between
myself and me, and 
sunrise and sunset
*
I & “I”—
we are not the same
for if I were “I”
I’d be ashamed
of all the nonsense
“I” proclaimed
when speaking
of “I” and “I”
and “I” again
but not of I
for I am not “I”
we are not the same

There are peculiar things that we remember from childhood. Little things. Small and seemingly unimportant. I had just such a vision earlier in the week while peeling an orange. An image of my father popped into my head. In this daydream of sorts my father takes a small bowl and fills it with sugar. He then peels and segments an orange. He places the small bowl of sweetness and the orange on a plate and presents it to me. A gift. Bright and glowing in the morning light slanting through the kitchen window. There, in that warm glow, he taught me how to dip oranges into a mound of sugar—making sweet that which was already sweet.

As an adult, I struggled to understand this ritual, and his need to keep everything, and what seemed his almost counterintuitive sense of excess, his sense of not necessarily needing abundance, but of wanting to give abundantly. He was a man of generosity and fullness, perhaps because he was born into a poor family in the Panhandle of Oklahoma. He was always the one to add an extra scoop to a bowl of ice cream. If he served cake at a family gathering, everyone received a colossal piece.

Not only was he born disadvantaged, my dad was also born in the heart of The Great Depression and The Dust Bowl. Because of the tenuous times in which he grew up, he learned to save everything; bits of wire, string from feed sacks, broken tools, discarded bags and boxes. A bounty of things that might someday be useful.

I suppose it makes sense that people who grew up during times of uncertainty and scarcity had a tendency to keep everything. But why did my father teach me to dip oranges in sugar? While I can never truly know as my dad died in 2021, I suspect it is because his heaping of sweet upon sweet was his way of assuring that his daughter would never go without, and would instead have more than she needed.

A Sweet Life

I am thinking of my father,
oranges, and a bowl of sugar. 

Why I recall this, right now,
I don’t know, but there they sit:
oranges, peeled and segmented 

He says, ‘Bite the tip, then dip.’

And so I did
unnecessarily sweetening
	what is
		already sweet.

A Mess of Wildflowers

Dear Mother Earth—
I do thank you

for a mess of wildflowers 
just outside my window
and for clouds
and rain

for falling down
and lifting up

for trees gathering green
     dropping 
	gold
	scratching lines
		across aluminum skies

for sunlight pouring across a field
	lacing through trees
		shimmering 
		in water beaded
		on my drinking glass . . .

A quiet note: The photo above is the view outside my bedroom window. Years ago, before we moved back home, my husband scattered these wildflower seeds—a living, expanding forever-bouquet that we get to watch fill in season after season.

We installed a couple of new hives on the farm a few weeks ago, but several days passed before I felt the space around them thin out completely.

The photograph above caught a moment that felt entirely liminal—the Kansas wind blurred the yellow blooms into a soft, watercolor wash, leaving one of our new honeybees suspended mid-air. She is perfectly poised, hovering at the exact threshold between the world and the bloom, held up by an invisible, humming vibration.

Lately, I have been thinking about festooning—the way these creatures interlock their tiny limbs to form a living, hanging chain that mimics the intricate knots of lacework. They suspend themselves in the empty spaces to measure the distance between what is and what could be, generating their own heat to secrete malleable wax. They don’t just build; they suspend themselves in the in-between gaps to mend what has been broken.

In the quiet of the morning, I imagined watching them hold that fragile line and it felt like standing on a threshold—a slow, patient geometry of making amends...

Festooning

The bees reach out 
interlock legs
link together 
in a living lacework.

They stitch a bridge—	a scaffold
Then measure 		   distance 

and generating heat 
     they soften 
     the malleable wax

create a plumb line 
straighten the fractured pathway— 
knitting themselves together
     they tat a dream 
from sweet honeycomb . . .

This week, the pasture here at the farm offered up its own kind of quiet magic—a threshold where seasons blur. If you look closely at the brome grass right now, it is doing something subtle but spectacular. It is blooming. Those tiny, delicate yellow fragments hanging from the stalks are its flowers, shifting our landscape from deep green to gold and mirroring the changing shades of the spring wheat. It feels like watching time itself move across the field.

Last Saturday, during our Wichita Authors meeting, these lines found their way onto my page. Interestingly, I had penned the opening lines before our gathering, so they slipped into the draft almost by accident. But the creative spirit usually knows what it’s doing before we do, pulling words from that thin space where past and present meet. I decided to weave them into the lines I jotted down during our writing sprint, letting the old and the new bleed into one another.

I wanted to share this fresh piece with you today as a small glint of weekend inspiration:

Brome

My bones are already buried 
in this land, no matter how far
I try to run . . .

The brome blooms
yellow flowers
delicate tears hanging
from grass fading
green to gold

where

the bees sing
a humming tune
notes known, unknown

in this meadow of my father’s
making, where horned locust trees
endeavor to make a home—still
uncertain, wavering 
on the weary wind

then, now

Over to you: Have you ever stumbled into a quiet moment where time seemed to stretch, or has a happy accident ever steered your creative work in an unexpected direction? Let me know in the comments.

Wishing you a restful weekend,

Jeanice

Recently, I found myself sitting with a sepia photograph of myself as a three-year-old girl at the park in Viola, Kansas. I have no visceral, conscious recollection of this afternoon. To look at a photograph of yourself from an age before memory begins is to stand in a thin place—a gap where the documented history of your life meets a stranger you no longer remember.

Yet, the reality behind the frame is deeply grounded. This was a place we visited out of necessity, hauling jugs to fill up with clean drinking water because our well water back at the farm wasn’t good to drink. Writing this poem became an act of navigating that threshold, using imagination to step into the silent, unremembered gap. Girl in Sepia explores that exact tension: a child reaching for something she can never hope to hold, caught in a fleeting moment that the hand, nor the heart can ever hope to keep.

Girl in Sepia

in the photo
a girl between
toddler and child 
legs arms still pudgy

her feet bare, toes splayed
planted on flat stones where 
rough grass tickles her legs

she stands alongside 
	a pipe stretching 
		out of the ground
		a faucet atop it

she grips the faucet with one hand
	her other hand is a fist— 
she leans forward 
	toward the flowing 
			spring water 
feels 	    its cool spray on her face
she is ready 
to drink—

She: 
small girl, water
cupped in the palm
of her hand—already
coursing through her fingers

The road unravels

where sky

and earth stumble

together

where asphalt ends

dirt begins

where yellow flowers

turn their heads

and where

alfalfa wafts

and we turn

before dusting home.

I’ve always been drawn to the concept of ‘thin places’—a term from my Celtic roots describing those rare spots where the veil between worlds grows sheer. It is that liminal space where the rooted earth of the prairie meets the heavy air of memory, and the ordinary suddenly feels sacred.

For me, nature, and the farm I live on, is such a place. I wanted to open a door for us to gather at this edge. Once a week, I’ll send out a reflection or a fragment from the farm or nature—a small ‘glint’ from the in-between.

To begin: Where do you feel the veil growing thin today? It could be the way the light catches the grass at dusk, the silence before a storm, or a memory that feels more real than the room you’re in.

I look forward to meeting you at the threshold.

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“. . . she remains, still and silent, face up, listening / to the sounds of the farm, its ghosts singing.”

We’ve been unearthing the bones of the old farm lately—heavy limestone foundation blocks buried in the soil that we intend to use as stacked borders for our garden beds. There is something meditative about handled stone; it is the act of layering one history atop another until they form a new kind of boundary.

Years ago, a different kind of architecture called to me. I took a motorcycle trip with my husband that led me to the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde. I am a woman who is deathly afraid of heights—the kind of fear that makes you crawl away from a canyon rim on your hands and knees. Yet, something about the ancient architecture of that place called to me.

I recently revisited a lyric essay I wrote about that trip, titled “Stacked Stones.” Looking back at those lines, I’m struck by how much of that journey was about finding a connection to a people and a past that wasn’t “mine,” yet somehow became part of me.

“She welcomed me into her home, suspended between mesa top and canyon valley where children’s laughter still echoes on canyon walls... Where I became part of stone and sky of tree clinging to cliff—of a people not mine.”

It was also a lesson in being bold. As Robert Frost once said, “Freedom lies in being bold.” I had to climb a 32-foot ladder and crawl through a tunnel just to stand in that history, and trust me, it wasn’t easy because of my fear phobia. Yet, I did it and I left a piece of my heart there, planted like corn on the mesa tops.

“I took nothing but left myself my heart with So’oh* singing among stacked stones, my joy planted like corn upon the mesa tops.”

Writing, much like climbing out of a canyon with your heart beating in your ears, is an act of bravery. We stack our words carefully, hoping the balance holds.

What place—physical or emotional—forced you to be bold? I’d love to hear your stories of “climbing out” of such spaces in the comments.

Until next time—Jeanice

*So’oh is the Hopi word for grandmother; there are variations in its spelling.

Excerpts are from my lyric essay “Stacked Stones,” originally published in the Writing from the Center Zine, 2025.

Poem Teaser: remember dust afloat in shafts of light . . . dream again this moment . . . a world you understood . . . dreaming as dust flashes in some late day forgotten light . . .

The Memory: Dust Motes Floating in Light

The farmhouse I grew up in was built in 1900 and though it was a small house, its main room had a large picture window made up of many small panes of glass held together with thin strips of wood. The old glass made the world outside the window seem wobbly and out of focus. It was through these imperfect panes that light flowed one hot summer day when I was laying on the floor watching dust dance in a sunbeam.

I recall watching the dust motes dance; their movement a murmuration of starlings flying over our small field of wheat. There was nothing special about that day, but it wavers in my memory. I hear the sound of the box fans losing the battle against the heavy heat, and I feel the silence of the house—a breath held, then softly released. In this moment, my world made sense: Mama is humming as she makes dinner in the kitchen; daddy is in the pasture mowing; my brother, he’s on another continent, a soldier in the army, and yet, he is there too. This moment felt perfect, sacred even, as though we were all held aloft in that beam of summer sunlight.

What makes this memory exceptional is everything it foreshadowed that I did not yet know. I did not see the sparkling particles as harbingers of my parents’ and brother’s burial beneath the Kansas plains or the turning of their bodies to nothing more than dust. I did not understand that the “horses nodding in the pasture” were signifiers of change, and that the “late day forgotten light” could only last so long because this day would soon fade into darkness.

And though that window no longer exists, those dust motes were one of my first connections to the poetry of nature and the world I lived in; poetry was everything and everyone—it was the “moths beat[ing] white wings against the glass.”

My poetry collection, Birds, and Other Transitions, gathers these glimmerings, these small specks of life together and shines the light of summer day through them so that they dip and dive like birds in flight.