David Anderson

By David Anderson (Emily’s grandfather). This was his world and he wondered what they were doing out there. The little snowman wouldn’t have seen them at all in the very, very early morning except for a blinking light moving swiftly across the water. Wraith-like the shadowy, indistinguishable form emerged through the falling snow, drawing closer […]

It wasn’t like we were going to go to our church this morning anyway.  Our church is in Tennessee and we’re in Washington. As snow fell intermittently with the sun vying for equal time, we watched the service online. A pair of ducks paddled out on the lake and from our window they seemed to […]

Each morning over our breakfast, sometimes crunching Honey Nut Cheerios, sometimes munching sausage biscuits, we watch the island appear in the darkness. The forested haven for eagles seems suspended in space on an almost indistinguishable line barely separating the dark water from the brightening sky. From our comfortable couch in the darkened room where we […]

“Could you take my picture with this big handsome guy?” Charlotte is, in one word, personality. She can walk up to a total stranger – which is what she was doing when she asked this question – and in mere seconds her request is granted and a friend is made. Thinking the big handsome guy […]

We had gone through a car wash on the morning of our wedding. Whirring sounds, like that of rapidly vibrating wings; blurring motions, like a flock of thousands of starlings changing direction and shape in the sky; splashing and slapping and spraying explosions against our windshield, like ospreys and cormorants and gannets plunging and crashing […]

A mountain where she comes from is really a hill, though the locals are pretty impressed still with their neck of the woods. So, that very chilly morning I scraped the ice from our windshield, etching a message for her in the process, and then I took her to my mountain for which she had […]

Most call it their honeymoon. We call it ‘our bucket-moon.’ The French have a phrase ‘voyage à la façon anglaise,’ referring to that time following the wedding where newlyweds set sail to romantic and exotic destinations to celebrate love and happiness, giving rise – like a full moon – to the notion that the first month […]

The road that could be seen from Paul McCartney’s window was a very real pathway that inspired the Beatles’ last No.1 hit, “The Long And Winding Road.” It is a road, wrote McCartney, “associated with terrific sadness and also a sense of hope. It is a road that leads to somewhere you never expected.” When […]

Early morning will find us in a fog-bound pasture where droplets like diamonds cling as if frozen to berries and vines. Afternoons along a river we’ll sit and enjoy the quiet pastoral scene of water unhurriedly meandering past the old, gnarled tree. Life for us anymore is like where we most love to be, wandering […]