Mary Grace Bertulfo

Home, prairie-muck dried onto the seams of my field pants, hiking boots splattered with mud, hair in pleasant disarray. The scent of freedom still clings to me. Just an hour before, by watch-time, by two-legged time, by analog hands or digital face, I stood in a place 14,000 years in-the-making, a glacier’s passing, strewn with [...]

Mabuhay. It’s been a long, good week, very productive — and I’m here again parked in the rain at a bend in the Des Plaines River. The ice on the riverbend is a soft, translucent white. The thawed parts of the riverbend are a flat brown tinged with green, gray on the surface. The bare-limbed [...]

65,000 gallons on land. “The oil spill has been contained,” an official-sounding man from Caterpillar chirped brightly on NPR’s morning newscast. No more wildlife will be affected – beyond the ones already touched. 6,000 gallons of oil sludged into the Des Plaines River. How many blue gills? How many herons? How many egrets? How many [...]

Flat white Great Lakes sky, Distant frozen fog, Yet warm enough for hammers to sound on rooftops. Men work in hooded sweatshirts, jeans, thin tennis shoes upon brick bungalows that kept us warm in the bleak months. But the trees stand haggard, bare-limbed and stoic. Maple and oak and Kentucky buckeyes – indistinguishable to my [...]

Perched securely on a branch above my car, the Cooper’s hawk munched on young pigeon. Starlings scattered, downy feathers drifted like summertime snow upon my head.

A tattered yellow book, ZEN FLESH, ZEN BONES sold for 50 cents at a used book store. Thin, old tape hangs the front cover onto the manuscript’s body; the back cover is lost to moves from Los Angeles to Berkeley to Chicago. Inside, over 100 stories and problems and ancient teachings from 5 centuries of [...]