West With Giraffes

by Lynda Rutledge

Because if ever I could claim to have seen the face of God, it was in the colossal faces of those giraffes.

Problem was, whenever I locked eyes with an animal I felt something more soulful than I ever felt from the humans I knew, and what I saw in that sprawled giraffe’s eye made me ache to the bone.

Me, I say thanks to what I’m eating. Its life for mine.”

murmuration—a rare bird gathering that looks like a dancing cloud.

It’s a strange thing how you can spend years with some folks and never know them, yet, with others, you only need a handful of days to know them far beyond years.

Time heals all wounds, they say. I’m here to tell you that time can wound you all on its own.

In a long life, there is a singular moment when you know you’ve made more memories than any new ones you’ll ever make. That’s the moment your truest stories—the ones that made you the you that you became—are ever more in the front of your mind, as you begin to reach back for the you that you deemed best.

the Great New England Hurricane of 1938 was the first to hit the upper East Coast in over a century and was the most destructive storm to strike New England in recorded history until 2012’s Hurricane Sandy.