David Anderson

At first, she thought someone was shining a flashlight in the window. Turns out it was the moon. Though it was 3 a.m. she shook me awake believing the view across the water was too spectacular not to share. She was right. We embraced and watched in the silence commanded by the scene, and though […]

Every Thursday is dumpster pickup day. Which means Wednesday is dumpster fill day. When we were dating, I’d ask her if she wanted to go to the dumpster with me. And she always said yes, because – even though our destination was the dumpster -together was where we wanted to be. Now that we’re married, […]

One year ago, on February 8, I wrote about that day. That day, then, was a special day. This day, today, exactly one year later, is a special day. On that very day, one year ago, following the death of my wife nearly a year previous, I had decided it was time to clean out […]

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 […]