Living Large on Little: Part 1

WordSpaceStudios, San Francisco 

It was such a gift. Time and space in San Francisco to write. While there, I was able to work on a nonfiction project that's been growing in a Word document for a long time: Living Large on Little: How to See the Invitation in Limitation. This is the first of several excerpts. From the introduction: 

I grew up mostly in rural Montana. At the edge of our field grew a young plum tree. I loved this tree. I whispered my hopes to it and sat in its shade and…I was probably reenacting Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. I was a bit of a romantic.

Beneath that tree, I dreamed what my life would be like when I grew up. Though I can’t remember all of those dreams, I do remember that my imagination sustained me. 

The farmhouse my parents rented was beautiful and old—over a hundred years at the time. It had no central heating. In the winter, our pipes would consistently freeze. The spigot mounted to the fence leaked enough water to create fantastical, three-foot-high ice sculptures. 

Winter mornings, my brother David and I would don our scarves, coats, hats, mittens, and Moon Boots and plunge through the snow to see what shape had grown in the night.

One year, the spigot dripped into a being an ice chair worthy of the witch of Narnia. It was so big, we could sit on it, and we did—taking turns being King and Queen, reigning over the white and gray landscape, ours to the edge of the visible world.

More to come next month.... 

*Living Large on Little is now available here.