Granted I haven’t spend a lot of time with Phyllis over the years that I’ve known her, but I had no clue about her artistic soul until I listened to her read a poem she wrote about her mother in her confident, measured voice with so much love and respect yet so much humor and style.

With drops of blood hitting my shins and feet, I ran to the front house and knocked rapidly on the side door. I could hear Noemi mumble, “Coming…”

I recently read an imaginative biography of a cocker spaniel called Flush: A Biography by Virginia Woolf. It’s about the life of British poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s dog Flush.