Linda Gray Sexton
A Beatles song tells us “love is all you need.” Sometimes I’m not so certain about this bold statement: I crave my work, among other things. But still, isn’t love the greatest necessity of all? As I think back over the course of my life, I see it in all its guises as it enters…
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I rode the wave, rising toward its rolling crest, and then dropped down into a gulf of pain. I was thirty-one years old, and it was a pivotal date for me: October 4, 1984. The day has just passed again in 2021, but that October Friday so long ago remains sharp in my memory—as sharp…
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For this week’s blog, I had written a “Letter” on the subject of love, on how precious it can be, how ephemeral, and how we must rely on it in order to lead a fulfilled life. However, four nights ago, I decided to watch a frightening and highly emotional documentary, rather than a popular love-struck…
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My mother’s name invades my writing room: the big, black, bold ANNE SEXTON jumping off the spine of Self-Portrait In Letters, a volume I edited when I was twenty-one, immediately after her suicide. Arranged on four of my many shelves are several rows of her books, both in English and in foreign translation, neither alphabetized…
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My new home is on a river with wide sweeping views: the Rhode in Edgewater, Maryland, to be precise. Right now the water has a little chop to it, and it is gray, because the day is overcast. We’ve just moved in and find ourselves transfixed by the amazing sunsets to the south, as well.…
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Living on the water is the height of beauty: from sunsets over a river that ripples with pink and orange while we watch from the deck; to a sky streaking up with color as I lie in bed at five o’clock in the morning and look out the window at the crab boats that putter…
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Below me I can hear the noise of the carpenters banging away as they finish sheet-rocking my basement. From my window I can hear birdsong and the river lapping at our shore. At last, we are ensconced in our new house. Moving itself was a nightmare, with an unproductive estate sale, followed by days of…
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This has been a month of sadness for me. My best friend has moved to a new home several states away. Though I know we will continue to talk on the phone and to text or email, it will not be the same as hiking together with my dog, or having supper or a glass…
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Just about four years ago, I picked up nearly thirty years’ worth of California experience and made my way back to the coast on which I was born. The West had welcomed me in 1989, just in time for a ferocious 6.9 earthquake; in 2017, another temblor rumbled under me—this time one of my own…
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It’s not time for summer reading yet, but it is time for a spring fling into new books—some published a while ago, some published recently. I am making recommendations of those I loved with the hope that you will be between books, or shortly will be, and will turn to one of these. Though someone…
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