Things that caught my eye and/or heart this week
The Little White House Up on the Hill from The Redneck Mommy. It’s a bittersweet story, and Tanis tells it so nicely. And that photo at the end is just so sad and lovely.
At the top of the shag-covered stairs, there was a stray bullet hole from a rogue hunter’s rifle. Every time I passed by it I was tempted to trace the circular outline with my fingertips and I’d shudder with the weight of my own mortality.
Bugged from An Entirely Other Day. A real-life interaction with our health-care system.
The PPACA is important. It’s vital. When a bug can bring down your family, when there are people who are willing to take away the shield that could prevent that, when we as a country have become so small and stingy and mean that we cheer the idea of ripping medical care away from fellow citizens, offering nothing in its place but sanctimony and self-righteousness… What are we? We’re not a country. We’re not a community. Oh, no.
We’re a zero-sum game. We’re the state of nature. We’re animals, gobbling down as much as we can, as fast as we can, swatting away the weak.
Simplicity and Our Home at the End of the Street from Moosh in Indy. This one reminds me of one of my favorite poems, “The Yellow Bowl” by Rachel Contreni Flynn.
In my home my arms are never empty, there is always a warm body to hold, some of them bigger than others, a couple of them way more furry than the rest. I am never truly alone here.
PMS from Hogan Here. Yep.
Regular reads
I forgot until late last night to pull together a few links from my Google Reader to share with you, so we’re going with the least-textual of them.
The Big Picture is the Boston Globe’s photo blog, and they do a marvelous job highlighting interesting and moving photos that illustrate current events. I love their large-image format, and it functions for me as a jumping-off point for a lot of news stories.
Moment Junkie is a collection of wedding pictures submitted by photographers. I was not kidding when I told you that I love weddings. Some of their photos are just light-hearted, silly candid shots (see: “The Highest of Fives” and “The Armpits“) while others capture such gorgeous raw emotion and intensely private moments (see: “The Weeping” and “The Moving Father-Daughter Dance“).