November's Sentences
Hello! Happy Winter Solstice! And welcome to November’s sentences. Thanks, as always, for reading.
11.1.25: The toddler, clad in a dinosaur costume for the second day in a row, squirms on the ground, scrawling her grievances in snot on the sidewalk.
11.2.25: The boy devours his grandfather’s favorite dessert to honor the birthday of a man he never knew.
11.3.25: The dry red dust turns the puppy’s undercarriage and tail red as if she waded into a shallow current of crimson.
11.4.25: The reservoir of patience recedes each time I reach for it—I believe it exists, but it remains a shimmer of water just beyond my touch.
11.5.25: I stand barefoot in the driveway for as long as I can stand the cold concrete to gape at the Beaver Moon.
11.6.25: The boy is asking me to explain who came up with the sounds of letters, but all of my brain’s possible responses twist together like licorice ropes.
11.7.25: The moon brims over the horizon seeping honey on my frayed nerves.
11.8.25: The milkweed’s scalloped husks and ethereal fluff twitch in the wind.
11.9.25: When reading the afterward to Crossing to Safety, a fragment from a Stegner letter catches my eye: “I feel autumnal but not bad.”
11.10.25: The day’s detritus lands in the dust bin: wood chips captured from the playground by kid shoes, chewed-up cardboard from the puppy, and a Geranium leaf that left a scarlet streak on the tile floor.
11.11.25: A cloak of liminality drapes over the taquería on Mission Street as friends describe a looming seismic shift and our hands cradle foil-wrapped burritos.
11.12.25: The defining feature of today’s editing task was a battle of wills over the Oxford Comma.
11.13.25: A quick conversation during a coffee break leaves me still chewing on the whimsy of calling a group of owls a “parliament” or a “wisdom” as the PowerPoint presentation resumes.
11.14.25: The Google calendar reminds me to give the old hound his heartworm medicine because I haven’t had the will to hit “delete” on that recurring event.
11.15.25: Our conversation winds around century-old grape vines.
11.16.25: A frog’s croak reaches me from the drainage ditch that is also home to a discarded Coors can.
11.17.25: Lying next to the boy in his bed as he hugs an oversized sloth, and I try to field his questions that relate to the distribution of wealth and lack of a social safety net.
11.18.25: Thick tendrils of steam dance over the fence as the fog breaks and sun hits the weathered posts.
11.19.25: The puppy explodes in a red swirl of dust at the side of two hikers, resting in the shade with electric-blue Gatorade and a pile of scratch tickets.
11.20.25: The wooden spoon scrapes over steel-cut oats stuck to the bottom of the pot like an oar grazing a pebbled riverbed.
11.21.25: A man exits the tortillería cradling a warm bag of corn tortillas against his abdomen, a compress against the internal wars and grief.
11.22.25: Coffee and salsa splatter on the poetry handed out by friends as the breakfast diner starts to brim with children and families.
11.23.25: A blare of headlights startles the downy owl from its perch on the yellow yield sign.
11.25.25: The months around the Solstice are the hardest time to resist gawking as each home’s windows are aglow with evening routine.
11.26.25: All manner of strollers and wagons pour out of the museum’s double doors—a wheeled exodus headed for naptime.
11.27.25: The morning light rubs across the belly of the geese leaving a smear of dawn.
11.28.25: Much later in the day, a memory from midnight returns—kneeling on cold tile, a tiny hand encircled around my finger.
11.29.25: I wonder if a dog’s paw senses a trail coated in graupel differently than one slicked by sleet or blanketed by cold snow.
11.30.25: I am but a silhouette in the window, rocking a toddler, as I see the first snow suspended in the streetlamp’s glow.