Two Screen Adaptations About Orphan Girls Who Change the Lives of People Around Them for the Better

Title: Anne of Green Gables (1985)
Director: Kevin Sullivan
Language: English
Rating: G

This two-episode TV mini-series adaptation of the Lucy Maud Montgomery book is enjoyable for multiple reasons, including the stunning Canadian landscapes.

Shades of autumn, spring and summer greenery, the sparkling ocean - it's a feast of the four seasons, full of natural beauty.

The casting is good too. Both the roles of Anne Shirley and Diana Barry are played well (by Megan Follows and Schuyler Grant respectively). As for the adult characters, I love how Colleen Dewhurst and Richard Farnsworth play Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, the aging sister and brother who initially wanted to take on an orphan boy to help them with their farm, but instead had Anne arrive at the local train station. I like how Marilla's hardness is tempered by a sense of justice and a wellspring of kindness, buried deep, that Anne eventually brings out. And how Matthew is pretty soft on Anne right from the start.

One thing I found both amusing and disturbing is how Anne often expresses emotions in a lofty, stage-like fashion, almost as if she is detached from them or afraid to discuss them more bluntly. It makes sense for a character who has dealt with loneliness and neglect by play-acting and disappearing mentally from a harsh environment to more beautiful imaginary worlds.

Overall, it's an excellent mini-series: lovely, engaging, spirited, and fun to become absorbed in for a while.

Title: The Secret Garden (1993)
Director: Agnieszka Holland
Language: English
Rating: G

One of the most beautiful parts of the movie is a time-lapse sequence showing the arrival of spring, with flowers opening, plants pushing slowly out of the soil, and the land becoming green. The images have a rich, visceral quality that I love.

This adaptation of the Frances Hodgson Burnett book is full of such beauty. It's also a movie infused with hopefulness, where the dark neglected places in the land and in people still have potential for life, with enough nurturing.

I didn't find the adult characters compelling, and the movie is too rushed towards the end, but it's still delightful. The younger actors are excellent. Kate Maberly carries the movie as Mary Lennox. The child of wealthy but neglectful colonials in India, she becomes an orphan living in her reclusive uncle's estate in the Yorkshire moors and finds in herself a great capacity for self-sufficiency and love.

Dickon, the boy of the moors who can communicate with animals, is played well by Andrew Knott, and I enjoyed the peevish, wounded theatrics (and genuine pain) conveyed by Heydon Prowse as Colin. Also, Laura Crossley plays Martha, a housemaid and Dickon's sister, with a wonderful honesty and sweetness.

So much in this movie hinges on the sense of place. The large house with the echoing cries, drafty corridors, and abandoned rooms inspires fear and curiosity. And the garden has a character of its own, full of fairy-like enchantment and possibility.

The Fits: Control and Loss of Control in Coming of Age

Title: The Fits (2015)
Director: Anna Rose Holmer
Language: English
Rating: Not Rated

While watching this movie, it occurred to me that I could have tuned out after 20 minutes if the lighting, the tone set by the music, or some other subtle element had been different. But the energy in The Fits, and the way all the elements came together, kept me engrossed in it. I found the movie compelling and thoughtful.

There's minimal dialogue, and a sense that there's so much more that needs to be said, but instead of being spoken, it's expressed in movement. The movie is filled with energy, much of it exploding out of the main character, Toni (Royalty Hightower), as she negotiates some of her first steps into puberty.

Set largely in an inner city community center, the movie focuses on two main activities. One is boxing, which is the boys' activity, though Toni starts off the movie training in it with guidance from her older brother. The other activity is dance, which is the girls' activity. Toni increasingly becomes drawn to the dance group, hovering at their perimeter, making some friends, but remaining uneasy about her place in it and what it means for her commitment to boxing.

The 'fits' refers to a kind of seizure that sweeps through the girls, affecting only them. It's never clear what it is exactly. In the movie, it's real enough (and very eerie), and it may represent something about the female body changing in adolescence, a kind of rite of passage. Toni witnesses the girls experience it, one by one, while not feeling anything like it herself. At least not at first.

The movie sets up various contrasts. Boys and girls, the vigor of boxing and the vigor of dance (the dancing is full of precision and power and includes punching movements, making it not too alien from Toni's experience of boxing). There are contrasts between the individual and the group, and tensions between simple conformity and a real sense of belonging. Are you doing something because it's expected or because you've found it's truly what you need or want to do? There are social pressures to fit in and find the place where one belongs, while struggling with doubt and feelings of displacement.

Toni also struggles to balance control over her body with the things she can't control. Mastering dance or boxing is an expression of power and individual commitment and skill. But the discomforts of growing up and changing, the loss of control that's part of experiencing the fits, these are overwhelming. They're frightening in how they can't be stopped.

The movements are the language in this movie. Toni and other characters make declarations with their movements and claim power for themselves through movement, even when confronted with the inexplicable and overwhelming fits, which seize control of their bodies and can't be resisted.

Four Very Different Short Stories Focusing on a Female Character

Title: Comforter of the Afflicted
Author: F.H. Batacan (Maria Felisa H. Batacan)
Where I Read It: Manila Noir
This story is set in Manila and centers on the investigation into the murder of Olivia Delgado ("Libby"), who was helping abused women escape from their violent partners. Although she is dead, Delgado remains a living presence, solitary and tenacious. She had channeled her anger into a lifelong struggle within a system where abusers usually have significant advantages, not least because victims are often conditioned (both by the abuse and by wider social mores) to bear the abuse without complaint.

The story becomes an unsentimental tribute to her and her life spent putting up a mighty fight, starting when she was young and attempting to protect her mother from her father. Delgado died fighting also. In spite of how it all ends, the struggle was worth it.

Title: Edie: A Life
Author: Harriet Doerr
Where I Read It: American Voices
A story about a nanny, and it isn't twee or in the least romantic. The writing has a wryness steeped in melancholy. The nanny works for a family where the father was only really in love with his first wife, who died. His subsequent wives aren't suitable. It's not that they're "evil stepmothers;" they just don't really fit into the household.

The nanny, meanwhile, can't serve as a replacement mother. However, she gives some kind of stability to the children and space on her wall for their eerie pictures. What happens when the children grow up? Is she forgotten, having never been a part of the family in a way they recognize? She has worked at the heart of the family but remains at its margins.

Title: Ruminations in an Alien Tongue
Author: Vandana Singh
Where I Read It: Other Worlds Than These

"To understand the aliens I became a mathematician and a musician. After that, those three things are one thing in my mind: the aliens, the mathematics, the music."

I found this story enthralling. It's lovely to see a story that combines math, music, and language, instead of rigidly dividing up the disciplines. The main character, Birha, is a professor on another world who has unlocked an alien outpost and studied the alien tongue (acoustical scripts and poeticas, a kind of instrument). There's also an alien artifact that changes the probabilities of events.

The story comes in waves and spirals. There are meditations on love and self and time. I think of this story as a journey that I went through wide-eyed and bewildered.

"I am myself and yet not so. I contain multitudes and am a part of something larger; I am a cell the size of a planet, swimming in the void of the night."

Title: Tits-Up in a Ditch
Author: Annie Proulx
Where I Read It: Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3
Raised by her grandparents, a girl grows up unloved and unvalued in Wyoming ranch country, in a story that deftly renders an entire society, the way it's changing, and everyone's status in it. Proulx shows the girl's life unfold from childhood to an early marriage and a stint in the military during the 2003 Iraq War.

I like when an author shows the ways an individual life is enmeshed in a particular culture and shaped by family dynamics. There's a degree of inevitability in this story's depressing ending. Not that people are utterly powerless or are merely a passive product of their environment. I've seen a tendency, however, to greatly underestimate the effects of upbringing and culture on the choices people make and the possibilities in their lives. The imagery of cattle in this story is tied to how the main character is pushed along certain paths.

Of Human Bondage: Explorations of Growth, Maturity, and Self-Destruction

Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham follows Philip Carey from when he becomes an orphan in childhood and begins to live with his aunt and uncle, who is a vicar.

Set in England (and sometimes France and Germany) in the late 19th century, the novel shows Carey attempting to make sense of the world by adopting different ideologies. First comes the religion of the boarding school he's sent to. Once he sheds most of those doctrines, he tries to become an artist in Paris and subscribe to various theories of art and life. It's only later, when he works to become a doctor (and backslides into near-fatal poverty along the way), that he begins to accept the mess of human life - the behaviors that are baffling and contradictory, the great muddle of people who are all just trying to live, and who can't all be captured in abstract theories. He does this with some humor and greater compassion.

I like how, even as he sheds different creeds or ideologies, he sometimes keeps their more beneficial lessons. How does he determine what's beneficial and what isn't? It isn't always conscious. He discovers answers through difficult experiences - like his poverty, and his self-destructive love for (or obsession with) a woman who repeatedly hurts and abandons him, and just seeing the cases he comes across in his medical studies and as a doctor. He also has a clubfoot and learns early on how people use it as an excuse to be cruel to him. (His clubfoot, however, isn't his major impediment; he has a tendency towards self-destruction that battles with his thirst for life.) Pushing through the great mess of the world, Carey sometimes finds people and activities that help give his life meaning. Some signs of his increased maturity are his capacity to live with uncertainty, to take pleasure in more straightforward and wholesome joys, and to accept human frailty and the fact that no, he'll never fully understand everything and that he'll keep making mistakes, though hopefully not the same kind of mistakes (with the same magnitude) as those of his younger years.

Does he give up some of his dreams at the end, or does he find other dreams and sources of happiness that are just as good, if not better? He finds a place in the world where he can do some good. Throughout the novel, Carey tried to find a place for himself in ideas or in people who share his ideas, but never really was at home anywhere. By the end of the book, he can make a home somewhere. He may always feel different from other people (as each individual differs from any other), but he can live among people with greater peace and a sense of having a shared lot in life.

Carey's struggles in the book, his attempts to make sense of life and his tendencies towards self-destruction, moved me.

(I read this novel for the Classics Club Challenge.)

Three Short Stories Featuring Gardens

Title: Broken Glass
Author: Sabina Murray
Where I Read It: Manila Noir

"Now you go play, and when you think you know what happened to that man, the one that flew straight down, you come and tell us, okay?"

In "Broken Glass," a huge backyard, some of it laid out in neat gardens, other parts of it wilder, reflects the characters' social terrain. A young girl named Angela lives in a walled-off wealthy neighborhood in Manila. On a visit to her aunt's home, she hears her mom and aunts discussing an attempted break-in the night before. A security guard apparently shot the intruder as he was scaling a perimeter wall, but it isn't clear where the body is.

Angela goes out to play on her aunt's property. Along with clear paths she can easily follow, there are also sections - especially farther from the house - that remain overgrown and untended. She encounters different domestic employees who, like the gardens, give her safe assurances mixed with hints of danger. They're obliged to treat Angela well, but they also refer to dark things that Angela is too young and sheltered to understand. By the end of the story, she's a little less sheltered, and her safety feels more precarious. I like how the author shows the subtle destabilizing shift in the girl's life.

Title: The Flower Garden
Author: David Guterson
Where I Read It: The Garden of Reading
A teenaged boy is torn between two dreams: continuing to be with a girl he loves, and playing baseball. He feels the intense promise of both. He helps the girl with her garden, and when he's with her there, he believes their love will last forever. But then he heads to baseball practice, and the girl feels less real to him than the dream of trying out for a professional team.

The story starts in a golden haze of summer, when he's 17-years-old and eyed with wistfulness and nostalgia by the old people in his neighborhood. He's a world apart from these older people, though by the story's end he's taken a significant step towards them, with his young dreams crumbling. At one point, in winter this time, he revisits the garden. The story seems to ask whether a relationship (or someone's dreams) can survive that killing blast of winter, whether there's enough faith in spring and renewal.

Title: The Garden of Time
Author: J.G. Ballard (James Graham Ballard)
Where I Read It: The Garden of Reading
A husband and wife live in an elegant estate with beautiful gardens. On the horizon, a horde of people approach. The husband slips into the garden and plucks a blossom off a special kind of flower. The horde falls back. Every time they get closer, he picks another blossom. Each blossom stops time, for a short while. The horde can't overrun the estate, tearing it apart, as long as there are enough of these special flowers in the garden. There's a sense that the aristocratic couple live in a magic bubble of time, and that the horde outside inhabits a different time altogether. Soon, the aristocrats will run out of flowers, their bubble will burst, and the life they've cultivated in it will end once and for all.

This husband and wife face each day with resolution, going about their lovely routines, even when they know their efforts are futile. The story's poignancy comes from the desire to see that beautiful bubble stretch out for longer. But they can't stop time and forever live as if threats to their way of life don't exist. The most they can enjoy is a temporary reprieve. No new flowers are growing in their garden. It isn't a fruitful place. As beautiful as it is, it may also be stagnant. There is no permanence compatible with mortal life, and any change, whether it's considered good or not, goes hand-in-hand with destruction of some kind. The husband and wife can see no way to either directly confront the horde or adapt to any of the changes coming. The state of permanence they achieve in the end is a frozenness without possibility of growth; they're still beyond reach from the horde, but their time is past. They can only exist as reminders for people who care to look closely.

Educating Rita (1983): Worth watching for Caine and Walters, and for the questions it raises

Title: Educating Rita
Director: Lewis Gilbert
Language: English
Rating: PG

I like this movie mostly because of Michael Caine and Julie Walters, and what they bring to their characters. But the filmmakers could have taken more time to explore the way good books can change people and looked deeper into how people teach and discuss literature. (I would have also changed the soundtrack, which gets repetitive.)

But Michael Caine and Julie Walters working together make the movie worth watching.


As Dr. Frank Bryant, Caine is a charming mess. He's a literature professor, witty and fun to talk to, but also burned out. He's got drinking problems that are endangering his job. He seems to have reached the limits of himself, taken himself as far as he thinks he can go, and now that he sees that it's gotten him nowhere and that the view is crap, he's self-destructing.

Susan (who calls herself Rita at the start of the movie) is a hairdresser who isn't satisfied with her life. She's married to a simple guy and should be happy making babies and going to the pub after work. Instead, she wants to study literature. She signs up for a course in adult education that winds up getting her one-on-one tutelage from Frank. Walters plays Susan with a no-nonsense freshness that's wonderful to watch. Even as her character becomes more sophisticated in the course of the movie, she manages more or less to stay steady and keep her refreshing directness; she changes, but her level-headedness and self-awareness will hopefully keep her from becoming like Frank.

That's one of the things that worries Frank - that Susan will turn into him. He likes Susan, and her untutored, honest opinions on the books she reads. He's afraid that the more she studies, the more she'll become like him or like too many of his colleagues: disillusioned, mannered, pretentious, all genuine enthusiasm lost. He wants to spare her from that. And, though he won't admit it, he's also afraid she won't have a use for him anymore. Not only will she leave him behind; with her education, she might also come to see right through him and perceive his emptiness. On the one hand, he doesn't want her to be blindly enamored of him; he wants her to read his own poetry and recognize that it's crap. On the other hand, he likes that she respects him and turns to him.

For Susan, the challenge is to study and grow without exchanging one narrow life for another. She leaves behind her working class neighborhood, but what if she gets trapped in another kind of narrow life (albeit one with more social cachet)? She wants to study literature to expand her mind and her possibilities in life. The danger is that instead of growing, she'll be contorting herself; not just polishing the roughness off her accent, but also blunting her eagerness and genuineness.

How will she stay genuine through it all? (Through some combination of her own wisdom, Frank's insights, and what she understands from her readings?) This could have been better explored; I wanted to see more of Frank and Rita really studying literature together, not just sharing some excerpts from books. What is transforming about literature? Why did Frank lose touch with the written word and get sucked in too much by the surrounding culture of pettiness and sophistication? What are the limits of books and their effect on us? Books change you, but you also have to bring yourself to the books; you have to let the text speak to you. In some ways, it's similar to how you connect with people.

The movie ends with Frank and Rita about to explore new possibilities in life. I won't say what these are, only their story shows how it's possible to stagnate and lose touch with yourself anywhere. This deep personal dissatisfaction can't be soothed with addictions (drink, in Frank's case) or by going along passively with the life that other people plan out for you, which in Susan's case would've been to have kids and not think too much.

*Image links back to its source (TheFilmReview.com).

Week in Seven Words #198 and #199

#198

dolls
Before the play, the actors come on stage to finish dressing. They're an all-male cast, and one of them (a noble lady) does a few warm-up sashays in his green gown. Those in masculine costume need help with their buckles and buttons; one actor smiles benignly at the audience as a crew member tries to maneuver his feet into a pair of pinched boots.

dreary
We live with paradoxes every day, and they sometimes seem like cosmic jokes. People who try to impress a rigid order on the world have to first rid themselves of their sense of humor.

gasper
They've taken off the masks to their Sesame Street costumes and puff on cigarettes in the cold air.

peculiar
When the documentary shows parts of a Catholic mass, it occurs to me that for most of the audience, this will be the closest they ever get to watching a mass. It's an alien rite.

spear
Waiting in line outdoors in the brittle sunshine.

tallow
The stage is lit with real candles, hovering in chandeliers that hang on ropes. Throughout the play, candle wax plinks onto the stage.

tumult
He plays, on alternate days, a violent king and a noblewoman falling violently in love.

Groundhog Day (1993): Egotist learns to love himself and others via a time loop

Title: Groundhog Day
Director: Harold Ramis
Language: English
Rating: PG

Hell is being stuck with yourself when you're full of self-loathing.

Phil Connors (Bill Murray) strikes people as having a high opinion of himself. He's a Pittsburgh weatherman full of contempt for his colleagues; he's convinced he's headed for a more prominent spot on national TV. An assignment to cover the Groundhog Day festivities at Punxsutawney is a personal affront to him; he hates the yokels in small towns and their silly traditions. When a snowstorm forces him to stay overnight in Punxsutawney with his producer, Rita (Andie MacDowell), and cameraman, Larry (Chris Elliott), he's gone through what he probably considers the most pointless, boring day of his life.

Until the gets up the next morning, and finds out it's Groundhog Day all over again.

Time is stuck in a loop, forcing Phil to relive the same day over and over. At first, he thinks he's going nuts. How can it be that he's waking up every morning at 6:00 am in the same bed and breakfast, with the same song playing from the alarm radio? As he realizes that this is real, and he's actually trapped in Punxsutawney in a 24-hour loop, he begins to indulge his hedonistic side: speeding, thieving, seducing women, eating junk food the way a man would when he doesn't have to care about cholesterol and cavities.

From Wikipedia, Fair use

An orchestra of recycled instruments

The kids in the video live in Cateura, Paraguay.

Worth Watching: In Her Shoes (2005)

Title: In Her Shoes
Director: Curtis Hanson
Language: English
Rating: PG-13

Rose (Toni Collette) and Maggie (Cameron Diaz) are sisters and close friends, but their relationship is strained, because they're both different in ways that heighten their insecurities. Maggie is "the pretty one" who is locked into the role of a bimbo and a flake; Rose is "the smart one," considered plain and bookish and dependable. They've lived with this unhealthy dynamic for years, stuck in their respective roles, and it takes a major falling out between them for their lives to change for the better and for their relationship to grow stronger.


It's their estranged grandmother, Ella (Shirley MacLaine), living it up in a retirement community in Florida, who helps reconcile them.


There's much to enjoy in this movie. There are moving recitations of poems by Elizabeth Bishop and e.e. cummings in scenes that show someone having a moment of breakthrough or connecting with another person in a new and deeper way. The filmmakers take care developing the sisters' relationship and prompt us to think about the way we define ourselves - how is it that we become the people we are, for better or worse, and what changes our self-perceptions?

A chunk of the movie is set in Philadelphia, and it was a treat for me to see Rittenhouse Square, the 30th Street Station, and of course the Art Museum steps, because you can't have a movie set in Philadelphia without someone running up the Art Museum steps. This time with dogs.


I think people who've just heard of this movie in passing assume it's merely fluff, but it's a little deeper than you expect and at times is beautiful. One major aspect of the movie I didn't like was how Rose's job situation is handled - not her need to rediscover herself or change, but the resolution to her work troubles and engagement to the man she winds up dating (and in general, I thought that there's much about the general family relationships, between father, grandmother, and stepmother that remains largely unexplored). As for Maggie, I like how the movie ends for her.

[Updated: 11/16/14]

*All images link back to their source (Flixster Community).

Happy Third Birthday, Sill of the World

For some reason I never celebrated the first or second birthdays of the blog, but why not start now with the third?


Some fun facts:

1) The first post I ever wrote was about life forms that live in inhospitable places, such as bacteria found in boiling acidic water. Clearly I knew where this blog was headed.

2) I wrote that first post on a Friday the Thirteenth. I don't believe in the superstition of Friday the Thirteenth, but I still love that of all days to launch a blog I chose that one.

3) When I started this blog I had only one reader: myself. Now I have people visiting, commenting, emailing me, from every continent (except Antarctica, that final hold-out...)

4) I started this blog on a lark, because I needed a regular creative outlet. I was at a stage then (and for a while after) of not wanting to share my work publicly. But now that's changed, and slowly I'm sending my work out, writing for publication, and emerging into the light once more. I'm not the same person I was then, and I hope this blog keeps growing as I grow.

Thanks for helping me make the journey so wonderful.

Worth Watching: Whip It (2009)

Title: Whip It
Director: Drew Barrymore
Language: English
Rating: PG-13



Whip It is a funny, energetic and heartfelt movie about Bliss Cavender (Ellen Page), an awkward teen who comes to feel most at home in a giant warehouse in Austin, Texas where she skates in a roller derby league. Roller derby is an aggressive contact sport on quad skates, explained nicely in the movie; the league Bliss joins is made up of amateur teams and all the skaters are women, which is what most roller derby leagues look like. She gets recruited to the Hurl Scouts, the underachieving underdogs of the league, and skates alongside the likes of Maggie Mayhem (Kristen Wiig), Smashley Simpson (Drew Barrymore), Rosa Sparks (Eve), and Bloody Holly (Zoe Bell), who become a second family to her. (Bliss's roller derby name is Babe Ruthless.)



When watching Whip It I sometimes knew what was coming, but other times my expectations were overturned. The movie is character-driven; it isn't chained to a generic coming-of-age or underdog athletes plot. It feels like a labor of love, with characters who are loved. The story is really about Bliss's character development, how roller derby gives her a new comfortableness in her own skin and a growing assertiveness that changes her relationships with other people.



The movie doesn't have any villains. Bliss butts heads most often with her mom, Brooke (Marcia Gay Harden), who in a lesser movie might have been portrayed as a shrill over-the-top tyrant, but here is human and understandable; Marcia Gay Harden softens her, gives her vulnerability, and she and Bliss actually have conversations, confront each other with love and pain. Bliss's arguments with her mom aren't about mindless rebellion or not caring anymore what her parents think, because she does care, and after getting a sensible perspective from Maggie Mayhem (her mentor/closest friend/"cool aunt" from her team) she also hopes for a truce. In part she and her mom argue because their temperaments are similar - both stubborn and tough, with a tendency to feel insecure about themselves.

The one character who comes closest to being villainous is Iron Maven (Juliette Lewis), a scarily intense skater who is Bliss's biggest rival in the league. Juliette Lewis plays her in such a way that when she smiles you don't know whether she's going to slap you on the back or slam your face into a wall. But Iron Maven isn't psychotic, and there's in fact a strange respect that springs up between her and Bliss. She's like a mentor from the dark side, pushing Bliss to be as competitive as she can be and live up to her derby name, Babe Ruthless.



It's great watching the actresses roller-skating and pulling off cool moves on the track. One of them, Zoe Bell, is an actual stunt double in film and television (she was Uma Thurman's double in the Kill Bill movies), but all of the actresses get to show off their athleticism and just have fun skating.



The movie also has a romance between Bliss and a musician, Oliver (Landon Pigg), which starts off sweetly enough but by the end feels a little tacked-on, the obligatory romance in a coming-of-age story. The men I liked watching in this movie were the Hurl Scouts' coach, Razor (Andrew Wilson), who achieves a state of supreme well-being when his team finally decides to study his playbook, and "Hot Tub" Johnny Rocket (Jimmy Fallon), the announcer/commentator in the league, who's just happy to be there, hungover and enthusiastic, trying and failing to score with the women. Also Bliss's dad, Earl (Daniel Stern), is pretty sweet, especially when he and the mom make eyes at each other.

Given how Whip It turned out I hope that Drew Barrymore keeps directing movies. The acting is good all around, especially from Ellen Page, Marcia Gay Harden, and Kristen Wiig. The movie has humanity and is centered on the characters; it also does something relatively rare in movies - portray friendship among many women, who discuss topics that have nothing to do with guys and clothes (though they talk about that too). And it's full of life and spirit. It should be better known.

*All images link back to their sources (Rotten Tomatoes and Flixster Community).

Week in Seven Words #106

bewilderment
Of all the emotions I read in the puppy's eyes (or read into them), bewilderment is most prominent. Why doesn't she get to piddle on the floor and run around wherever she wants and chew on the DVD player? Why do her keepers alternate between belly rubs and scoldings?

chafing
Some of them yield to a lack of responsibility, the close of their life where they can be tended to and spend their time drawing, watching videos, or staring out of windows. Others bristle, even gently, against the activities suggested to them. They shrink away or turn stony when someone addresses them in a patronizing babying voice. Their body or mind might be turning on them, and there might be no one left who bothers to visit, but they aren't going to settle happily before a pile of coloring pages and play with crayons.

chirography
I don't know what he's writing about, as he sits in the subway car with a notebook propped on his knee, but his hand-writing is beautiful. I hope the words are beautiful too. I think he could make art of a grocery list with his languid looping script.

heartfelt
Because she can't see so well, she dictates the Valentine to me, a week before Valentine's Day. I write her words out on a red, purple and pink construction paper heart, and I wonder if the person she's writing to is real, or still alive and living at the address she remembers. She has a great memory for addresses. Her words are straightforward - "thank you for visiting me, I'm sorry I couldn't see you at the time" - and I hope this person is real and that the Valentine arrives at the right place.

landmarks
An empty bandshell, the grand avenue of elms, an angel in a dead fountain. The bridge I cross shows up in sharp reflection on cloudy water.

promise
I hope to be worthy of the risks I'm taking.

ruction
Geese and ducks struggle over crumbs from bread and muffins. Two of the ducks whirl in a circle of combat on the water, a taut coil of movement, until one of them breaks free and skips away like a stone across the surface of the lake.

Extracts: Love and growth in Journal of a Solitude

Growth is demanding and may seem dangerous, for there is loss as well as gain in growth. But why go on living if one has ceased to grow? And what more demanding atmosphere for growth than love in any form, than any relationship which can call out and requires of us our most secret and deepest selves? - from Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton