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 w...

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, am...

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...

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...

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...