Especially for those friends who live alone
For whom the morning reflex is to reach for the phone
And doom scroll
And then roll over and doze for another hour
You do what you have to do
You shower
You feed the cat
You water the plants
You shop for groceries…some of the time
If you made promises
You keep them
Sometimes late with apologies
But so much of life now
slides and slides by you
like cars and houses and trees
in the flood waters
You escape from the news
Into games on your phone
Into serials on your tv
Into clicking on websites
Down the rabbit holes
Let’s promise ourselves
An hour outdoors
An hour reading a book
An hour talking to a friend
Breathe in
Reach out
Kristin Moyer, July 9, 2025
Blog
-
For All My Friends Who Have Gone Down the Rabbit Hole
-
After the Derecho
The storm has moved on
And now we emerge from our homes
To see the trees once so green and graceful
Stripped
Snapped
Broken
Ravaged
Savaged
As though some drunken storm god
had used them for toothpicks
And then tossed them away
We cannot walk without stumbling into fallen trees
their bodies broken and piercing the sky
Bring out the pipers
Bring out the drums
Bring out the fiddles
Play a dirge
Play a lament
Sing our sad songs
Mourn the green passage
Kristin Moyer
July 2, 2025 -
Eight to Eighty-Two
“I like your butterfly earrings,” I say to Sara, age eight, and I show her my very similar dragonfly earrings, and we discuss dragonflies and the ones she has seen, and I tell her that dragonflies are very good at eating mosquitoes. We are sitting outside at a picnic table, enjoying cupcakes and popsicles and goldfish crackers. It is the last day of our Sunday school class at my UU church. This second grade class is called Moral Tales and focuses on how to build one’s moral compass.
I signed up to teach a year ago because I felt it was time for me to connect once again with a new generation of children, as I had eight years ago when I also taught Moral Tales. The children from that class now are strong, independent teens, who wave to me in passing, “Hi, Miss Kristin!” In two years these teens will be moving on to college. Time for a new crop of kids and parents and teachers to build new generational bridges for me. There is no neighborhood on the street where I live, only three houses, and no children. My church is my village.
Society tends to put us into boxes by age. I am trying to stay out of boxes.
Just before the class went outside, one of the girls Nora asked if we could sing Hollow Bamboo, a song that I had taught them several weeks before. So we stood up tall like bamboo and sang
We are hollow bamboo
Open up our hearts
And let the light shine through
We are hollow bamboo
Open up our hearts
And let the light shine through……
Kristin Moyer
June 1, 2025
-
REMINDERS
Reminders
Don’t let anyone steal your joy
Don’t let anyone dim your flame
Don’t let anyone take your awe from the sunrise
or that miraculous person who is ringing up your groceries
We are all miracles
Take a friend to lunch
Plan something that gives you joy
Donate to a cause you believe in
Call someone who has been on your mind
Protest wherever and however you can
Stand Up
Kristin Moyer
March 2025 -
Snow Drops
I turn away from my computer and see—-
Outside my window the snow drops are blooming
They do not know that my country is going to hell in a hand basket
They only know that the earth has warmed
That the days are growing longer
That it is time to emerge from the earth
And show their brief beauty
It is a kind of courage
I think
To push out of darkness into light
Kristin Moyer
February 28 2025 -
Time Travel
Stepping into a gallery in the Washington National Museum of Art
And greeted by a luminous painting
All sky and light and possibility
I exclaim out loud "Turner!"
And the guard at the door swivels to look at me
And I hasten to explain--Turner one of my favorite painters--
And he shrugs and returns to his post
While my mind goes back in time
To seeing paintings by Turner
In one of the museums in London
Wall after wall of them
All filled with light
And how long I stood and looked at them
And then further back to the Washington National Museum
Where my father and I went every year together on his visits
Just the two of us
Our ritual father-daughter outing
And the last visit before his stroke
"Ah, Turner"
He said, as we entered a gallery
"One of my favorites"
Kristin Moyer
January 14, 2025 -
Carousels
The recent news stories about the Minnesota State Fair reminded me that my father took my older brother Kit and me to the state fair one summer. I must have been six or seven. We were living in Minneapolis at the time.
I remember that it was warm and crowded and that we walked and walked. At one point we walked through the Midway, with tall painted panels advertising strange beings, like the Bearded Lady and the Tattooed Man. My father hustled us past those. Our destination was the carousel.
I was entranced—-the music, the motion, the painted images at the top, the lights, the horses with their wooden manes, forever gliding up and down on their metal poles. That was my first carousel ride, with my father watching me.
I have ridden many carousels since that day, long after I had given up more exciting amusement park rides. When my son and daughter were growing up, they rode the carousel on the Washington Mall, on our summer visits to the Smithsonian museums. Years later, my granddaughter Emma rode that same carousel in its new home in Glen Echo Park in Maryland. On my refrigerator door I have a photo of Emma age three on a prancing carousel horse, with Bill standing beside her, smiling and holding her securely. Forever going around to the music, while the painted pony goes up and down.
Usually the carousel figures are horses of different colors, but sometimes there are zebras or other animals. The last carousel that I saw—-but did not ride, because it wasn’t operating that October day in 2018—was in the seaside village of Cascais near Lisbon in Portugal. It was a beautiful small carousel, with horses, but also a bull, a giraffe, a pig, a donkey, and for little children, a swan and a rooster, all carefully carved and painted.
I guess it is fitting for my love of carousels that I played the part of the carousel owner Mrs. Mullin in a community theatre production of Rodger’s and Hammerstein’s musical Carousel. My daughter Melinda was in the production, too, as one of the children, and we had fun going to rehearsals together and to the cast parties after the end of the run.
A wish: that I may ride a carousel one more time, before the music ends.
“…And the seasons they go round and round
And the painted ponies go up and down
We’re captive on the carousel of time
We can’t return we can only look behind
From where we came
And go round and round and round
In the circle game…”
The Circle Game, by Joni Mitchell
-
Clearing Out Clutter
July 17, 2024
I have been busy looking in corners and clearing out items I no longer am using or no longer need or wish to keep—-a child’s guitar, a computer keyboard, canning jars—-and today I opened a cardboard box of sewing notions and fabric pieces of various sizes. In the box were the last two pages of a letter from my mother—inside this particular box because on the back side of the last page of her letter she had typed instructions on how to replace zippers.
Reading the letter, I can hear my mother’s voice again, chatting about the work she was doing in their garden in Oregon, the photo I had sent of my little son David, soon to be one year old, and the problems facing her mother-in-law (my grandmother) because my grandfather was developing dementia and needing more care. My grandparents lived faraway in Arkansas.
My mother wrote “I just hope that I die in a hurry while I still find the daily routine a challenge and a pleasure.”
I cannot stop the tears. She was sixty-one when she wrote those words. Twenty-two years later she would decline relatively quickly and die of congestive heart failure, surrounded by family who loved her. I held her hand. I closed her eyes.
I fold the letter carefully. I will put this scrap of letter into the blue box that holds the last of my mother’s papers.
Not everything is clutter.
Kristin Moyer
-
To the New World….
Late in the fall of 1886, Carolina Margareta Brandt, my great-grandaunt, left Sweden on the long journey to America. With Carolina age 39 traveled her niece, Milda Kristina age 14, and her nephew Carl Henning age 12. These two also were Carolina’s step-children, because Carolina had married August Johnson the widower of her sister Cristina Carlotta who had died 6 days after Carl’s birth. The youngest in the group was Carolina’s and August’s son Gustaf Albert, age 9. Another woman and her children from the village went with them.
The group traveled from their village near Lake Vanern in central Sweden to Gothenburg’s harbor. They sailed on the Diana from Gothenburg to Frederickshavn in Denmark, then took another ship to Bremen, Germany where they boarded a German steam/clipper ship the SS Hermann built 1865.
They landed in Baltimore on November 11, 1886 and traveled by train to Minneapolis where my great-grandfather August Johnson was waiting for them. He was sitting on the porch of a boarding house, when his wife and his three children came trundling along the walk, looking, according to the family story, like gypsies.
The iron-bound wooden trunk you see in the photographs also went to the New World, via Liverpool and then to Baltimore. I am sure the family traveled with smaller bags, too.
What do you think Carolina packed in that trunk? Was my grandmother Milda Kristina allowed to put something in it? What would you take from home across an ocean to a new land? The trunk, a cherished family heirloom, now sits in the home of one of Milda’s great-granddaughters.
Last June, I stood on the bow of the canal boat M/S Juno built 1874 as it sailed out of Gothenburg harbor on its way to the Gota Canal system of rivers, canals, and lakes, and ultimately into the North Sea and the docks of Stockholm. I thought about those brave women in my family who sailed from that same harbor across the Atlantic Ocean, and that wooden trunk containing pieces of their lives. I felt a circle had been closed. And I was grateful for the traits of tenacity, resiliency, and courage I have inherited.
-
Solar Eclipse, April 8, 2024
And while the moon passes in front of the sun
And thousands tilt their heads
And stare with their black opaque eyes
On my neighbor’s roof
the men with hammers continue
tapping tapping
Across the pond
a lawnmower growls into life
ruthless with the spring
And at my poolside
the men with their long brushes
Sweep the walls slowly steadily
The light dims, the day cools
but the hammers tap tap tap
(with some apologies to William Carlos Williams)
Kristin Moyer
April 2024
