Helena Clare Pittman

I saw one crimson maple leaf, very small, brilliant, on my driveway next to my mailbox. Last week! No! I cried. I don’t want to see you! I veiled my eyes against that gorgeous thing. It’s hard to accept that summer is waning. Everyone here feels it. People talk about it in dropped voices, low tones. It’s the bad news that supersedes the roiling of the world and its agonies...

The five of us, myself and the four writers who registered for the retreat, had dined together. We then drove to the place that would be home base for the next four days: The Lazy Pond Bed and Breakfast, in the town of Liberty, New York, where I live. Lazy Pond is just down my road, but the others had traveled from all over the country.

One of the first stories I wrote to submit to the children’s book market, and therefore, first, to the writers group, the one I’ve written about here, in these blog posts, was called, “A Long Way For Tinker.” “You can write,” one of the writers in the group told me after she’d read it. “But I don’t think this one will sell either.”

One of the things I love to paint in my long lineup Still Life paintings is a group of vintage cans I’ve accumulated—tobacco cans, powder cans, baking powder cans. I love the look of their graphics, their beautiful colors, and the way they remind me of another time: childhood...

Many years ago, my sister and I went on a house tour, a walking exploration of some of the great old houses in Oyster Bay, on Long Island, the peninsula that extends east from New York Harbor, sitting in the Great South Bay where it meets the Atlantic Ocean. The house tour was something I was less interested in than was my sister, but it was a way for us to spend time together...

The winter challenges me in this woods place where I live. Once the snows come, the fog—fogged in, iced in, or waiting for the plow to clear my driveway, the sander to free me—I am here, awaiting people I’ve come to depend on to free me. People who are so reliable they are like family. Gratitude becomes very clear to me in winter...