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When I listen to music, the different songs evoke different emotions. Some sixties stuff makes me very sad, as does some music from the early eighties. Other music makes me happy. What about you all? Any special songs? Eras? I loathe ABC, but a woman I love more than life loves it. Whenever I...

I am a social worker. In the course of my career I meet lots of different kinds of people in all kinds of situations. Charles H is 80 years old. He would have been 81 in May. Charles was married for 62 years to a woman he met when he lived in a state run orphanage. When they aged out they...

There is a young boy I work with. He is a handsome little guy; twelve years old, he is rangy, thin, and very much alone among many people. Justin's life changed radically five years ago. He was woken in the dead of night by a SWAT team member. A black-clad boogie-man carrying an AR-15, and...

Loneliness is a strange place to be... We are not always alone... We are not always isolated... Yet we are lonely... Where is loneliness? For me it is in every thought that goes unexpressed, lost without words spoken, or spread across a page somewhere... Or in a sigh that comes from a place...

A long time ago, when I was very young, I visited with a child relative in a hospital in Newcastle, Australia. There were plenty of visitors, so I went and sat with a four year old child who never seemed to have anyone come to see him. He suffered chronic pneumonia. His chest rattled...

There, upon the moor bleak A lonely soldier stands Eternal guardian to a battle long fought In another time, and long ago. What is it the soldier seeks As he guards this quiet land Does he wait in trust but all for naught So that homeward he may go? Does he dream, this sentinel, Of home and...

Here, in Appalachia, the mountains, old as time, coat the deepest blue of the evening sky with the soft brush of trees at their highest points. The valleys stretch this way and that, their bottoms hidden beneath swirling mists keep their secrets safe. Now, as winter ages, and the snow on the...

As the snow blows across the landscape outside, and layer upon layer of pure clean white flakes settle, I watch the wind shake yet more from the branches of the elm and birch trees that are so plentiful hereabouts. Now and then birds settle for a moment, and then take off once more to repeat...

Long ago, in another life, there was a place where the sea, the earth, and the sky met. A place where it was hard to know where the world ended, and heaven began. A place where the sand feels the touch of tiny wavelets that drum a never-ending gentle rhythm, and the stars are the only light that...

This morning I woke up, as usual, to the sounds of three mule deer drifting silently past my window. I could feel their eyes on me, curiously surveying the human that lays out their needs to survive winter's long journey. Reaching my foot across the bed, I could feel the ice chill of the...