Carole Moses

Since I was a small child, I’ve been fascinated by other people’s houses. My kindergarten had a hinged, folding house that was filled with child-size furniture: a stove, sink, and chairs.  I loved that room and mourned when I could not use it because too many other children  were playing in it. When I got older, I always loved museums that had period rooms to gaze at  and see how people lived in different times. I am not attracted so much to large eighteenth-century rooms, however.  They seem too impersonal and grand.  It would be hard to imagine children running unhampered through these large palatial dwellings or sitting in those spindly and uncomfortable chairs. And as for romping with pets, well . . . But give me a room from a country cottage, and I’m all set to admire the furniture, tools, and implements of daily life. Along with this infatuation with houses comes my love of dollhouses. My grandfather, who did woodwork, made me a dollhouse for my birthday when I was a little girl.

After my water aerobics class at the Y, I spend about 15 minutes in their hot tub. The whirlpool shoots out water from around a built-in, wrap-around seat. I always sit right in front of one of these spouts because the action of the roiling water relieves some mildly painful stress in my lower back. As I sit, I notice the plethora of bubbles moving on the surface of the  water. They are not static, but are in constant motion. Some bubbles are small and they seem to move in packs. Occasionally a large bubble---about the size of my thumb nail--will  pass by and one, two, three, or more of the smallest bubbles will attach themselves to it. And the newly configured heap of bubbles moves along. As I watch this little drama, I try to speculate on why some smaller bubbles keep their independence while others cling to a larger one. And then—poof—the large bubble pops and they all dissipate. I look up “bubbles” on the internet and get a very scientific discussion of surface tension, among  othe

I actually remember her telling me about this incident when it happened, which must have been sometime in the late eighties, only as I remember it it was a sign of Fall, and the boy didn't just ask her to show him one; he showed her a leaf he'd picked up and asked her if it qualified.  I'm very certain of this, but memory being what it is, the question must remain unresolved. As I was taking a neighborhood walk one day, a small boy approached me and said, “Mrs., can you show me a sign of spring?” Further conversation with the child revealed that his teacher had assigned his class to bring signs of spring into the classroom to discuss.  Fortunately we were standing by the edge of someone’s lawn where wild violets were starting to grow and there was one early dandelion. I assured him that these would be good signs of spring. This January, the weather has been very cold and the skies mostly overcast. It seems that, the sunnier it  is, the colder it is. But I know that spring i

As I enter the Quaker meeting house on Sunday, I see something that I have never noticed before. On each side of the stairway leading to the porch is a stone that seems crafted by humans, but what the purpose is remains unclear. They are not simply large rocks because their sides are smooth and both are  shaped into a square about 12 x 12 x4, with rounded corners. (I later found out that they had originally held up the two sides of a gate into the Quaker burial ground behind the meeting house. When it was taken down, the stones were moved to be simply decorations.) But what causes me to look at them closer is what is growing on them. There are splotches of color (green, yellow, and a tinge of blue) and a lovely green, velvety sheen to the rocks. And then I think of the very small eco-systems that these stones must have. Curious,  I go to my computer when I come home and read about lichen and moss and find some remarkable facts. Lichen represent a symbiotic relationship between a fungus

It is a cold January, and we have some avian magic in our backyard. Hordes of sparrows cover the ground under our bird feeder, to eat the spilled seed, while others stand on the posts of the feeder itself and eat their fill. Then some noise or movement, indiscernible to human ear or eye, disturbs them. And they disappear. Just like that. There one minute, gone the next. Now, they have not really vanished anymore than the assistant has been cut in two by the magician. But they have flown to the dark elderberry bushes and the equally barren forsythia bushes in our neighbor’s yard just behind our fence. Camouflaged and concealed completely from view, they seem to have simply disappeared. They simply look like dark outlines of desiccated leaves. And a couple of seconds later, when the danger is past, they all suddenly return. There is something comic about them, how they move so quickly as to seem to disappear in a puff of smoke. I think I could watch them for hours and not tire of it. And

Shortly after moving into our house many years ago, my husband planted a trumpet vine by the corner of our front porch. It took off like a flowering kudzu. We are not house-proud and, since our three children have grown, we have abandoned all effort to keep the growth of the greenery in check. No longer do we clear a spot and buy flowers to create a garden. That was fine when our children were young—we wanted them to appreciate nature—but as we get older, the bushes and greenery have taken over, especially the trumpet vine. It now puts out feelers across the living room window, has crept up the porch roof, and even tried to invade our second story study when it found its way through a tiny crack in the storm window. Oh, did I mention that it has also climbed thirty feet into the air using our fir tree as a trellis? Its wooden branches have curved around the handrails of the four steps to our porch so there is no way the handrails will ever become loose. And it also grows laterally, ext

This one is probably unfinished; I found it in a separate word doc with so many typos that it was very difficult to clean up. One take-home final in the Art Department of the college where I taught Was to give students 100 color cards and ask them to reproduce the colors, using only the primary colors. That seemed difficult enough, but when I meditate by the shore of the Susquehanna, I discover that God has created even greater art than was covered in any Art appreciation course. The trees there are clothed in a myriad of colors, which is not covered by one, two, or even three labels. There are the dark green, the lime green, the light green, the green that almost shades off into blue, Kelley green, and more. Each has its own permutations. There are many shades of green that we would designate with the paltry adjective “lime green” and there are spruces whose green shades off into gray, not to mention the green that has almost a blue tinge. And as if this were not enough, the bark of t

As my husband and I lie in bed on a cold winter evening,  We hear the sound of sleet hitting the ground. The next morning we awaken to view a tree in our backyard that is covered with a glaze of ice. The limbs of the tree shine and glitter in the cold. But warming soon sets in, and drops begin to fall from the tree’s limbs as the ice starts to melt. It is a spectacular sight: the tree seems to be crying and lamenting or raining wholesome water on the flower bed around it. Which is it? A lament or a nourishing presence? Well, do you like your coffee cup in the morning half-full or half-empty? Sometimes it is our perceptions that define the world. And perhaps the tree is doing both simultaneously. Grief sometimes brings great spiritual health, so  may the tree’s tears bring great fecundity to the earth.

Poor Oedipus! Fleeing his home to avoid a prophecy that he will kill his father and marry his mother, he comes to Thebes and does precisely that. There are, however, extenuating circumstances. He never knew he was not his adopted “father’s” son.  And, in probably the first example of road rage in literature, he unknowingly killed his biological father in a dispute over right of way. When he entered Thebes, he did marry his mother, the widow of the man he had killed, and sired four children by her.  But he was completely ignorant that she was his mother. When a plague mysteriously decimates Thebes, he is told by a prophet that something evil is polluting the city. His attempts to find the polluter lead to his own downfall: it is he himself. Who has not heard of Freud’s famous Oedipus complex? However, the myth may contain a deeper wisdom than Freud realized. Oedipus from the beginning tries desperately to do the right thing. But the circumstances of his life are so ambiguous that he win

I have before me three acorns in various lush shades of brown: mocha, mahogany, and a cream color. They all seem to have incised in their undersides a circle of what looks like print, in an alphabet simultaneously familiar but unknown to me.  I cannot read the message. One of these acorns was recently given to me  by my husband after a walk in the woods.  It had a flaming orange top that spilled over onto the brown nut.  It was as though mango frosting was dripping down the sides of a chocolate cake.  I admired it and placed it in the kitchen window sill with my two other less colorful acorns. In the morning, I went to examine it again.  But it had vanished.  I searched around the sink, thinking that it had fallen off.  But it was gone or, rather, the orange frosting had disappeared.  It had turned into a plain brown acorn like its comrades. Now, if I were given to allegory, this is a ready-made one.  Objects of this world may lose their surface glitter, although they retain a deeper s

“Yesterday, I took a trip with  my whole school, except April. She didn’t make it.”  From a paragraph written by a 2nd grader and published as part of an education section in the Williamsport Sun-Gazette. The last sentence of this paragraph haunts me. Why did poor April not “make it”? Was her dog run over just as she was about to leave for school and she spent the day grieving for him? Had she neglected to have her parents sign the consent form and therefore was barred from this outing? Did she see this class trip as a joyous excuse to escape the tedium of school? Or the bullying? Or was it something even more dire? Did she suffer the onset of symptoms of a disease that eventually proved fatal? Poor April. The possibilities are infinite. I think back to my school days at P.S. 154. Was it second or third grade? I forgot my permission slip for a school trip to Prospect Park. In vain, I begged my teacher to call my home and get verbal permission. I promised to be really good on the trip.

The old cactus.  It's not blooming now, but it probably will later this year.  In any event, it remains in good health. My husband and I have a Christmas cactus that we inherited from my aunt. It’s accompanied us to Kansas and Ohio, and now resides in our study in Pennsylvania. It must be at least sixty years old, and is showing its age. Infested with white spores, the leaves flop and dangle over their pot, as if begging to be put out of their misery. But my husband has an emotional attachment to it and refuses to let it go. “ But sometimes you have to be ruthless, if you’re a gardener,” I argue. My words fall on deaf ears, and the stricken look on his face makes me back down. When he goes on a trip, I purchase a new cactus hoping that he will let me make an exchange. I congratulate myself on my cleverness. Alas, we now have two Christmas cacti as he refuses to part with the heirloom plant. The new cactus.  It IS blooming now, and rather impressively at that. He puts the plant unde

We had a snowfall in Pennsylvania and, as my husband and I drive some of the back roads, I wonder what makes this snowfall seem so unusual. I’m mystified by the white world around me, and keep asking myself why it seems so right, so comfortable. Then it comes to me: the perfect stillness and lack of movement make this landscape peaceful and accepting. The trees, bushes, and shrubs are covered with a thick glaze of snow and ice, and there is not the slightest breeze to move any bough or branch. The silence is total; It reminds me of an artificial winter scene. And suddenly I am carried back to my childhood and our neighbor’s son, who had an elaborate electric train set up in their basement on a pool table. I loved this train set and always anticipated the Christmas invitation we would get to visit them. Mind you, it was not just a train running around a large track, although it was that too. But it was a veritable community, with miniature houses, people, traffic lights, and even a load