I don’t know when exactly it happened, but somewhere in the course of my 34 years, I accepted the idea that most of my clothes would be uncomfortable. These days, I have a closet full of five-inch stilettos, nipped-waist pencil skirts and close-cut clothing in rough, hard-finish fabrics. And most of the time I’m completely fine with […]
Tag: body
The Body Electric: Day Six
I’ve always been a woman with nervous hands. The rest of my body is still and graceful by nature — balletic, after all these years. But I wear my tension in my hands, which are always folding and unfolding, pulling and smoothing and clenching and unclenching, as if engaged in an eternal game of […]
The Body Electric: Day Five
Today. I go out walking in the last of the light — before the sun winks out behind the mountains. I feel the cold in my lungs, the night coming on, and I think: It’s true, what they say. The twilight swallows us all. Still … For a moment … My shadow stands tall. […]
The Body Electric: Day Four
The dinner’s been eaten. The laundry’s been folded. The apple crisp is in the oven, filling the house with its fragrance. And suddenly, for the brief span of an hour, there’s nothing to do but just be. So I put the kettle on, and I make sage tea. * If the finest pleasures are the simple […]
The Body Electric: Day Three
Yesterday, as the sunset just begins to flare over the mountains, I pull up to a favorite coffee shop. I am smiling — the anticipation of being with good people always makes me smile — but before I step out of the car, I take a breath and focus. Listen, I tell myself. And then […]
The Body Electric: Day Two
Yesterday. I am running errands. Running with my mind cluttered by Christmas and all its trappings. And so, on a whim, I peel off I-581 and take the exit into downtown. Park just under the pedestrian bridge, across the tracks from the art museum. I take a long breath, and cross over. * Inside the […]
The Body Electric: Day One
Yesterday. Early evening. I slip into my running shoes and sit down on the kitchen floor by the back door, in front of the rainsplashed full-length mirror. Slowly, I slide into a stretch, feeling all the little muscles in my legs resisting until, after a minute or so, they loosen all at once. Whatever was […]
The truth behind the quiet …
If you’ve been reading my words for awhile, you may have noticed a quiet here, building. It’s not that I haven’t been posting; it’s just that I haven’t been saying very much. This is a tell: it’s something I always do before I’m about to speak. … A little intake of breath, I suppose. […]
One for the renegades …
I still remember where I was the first time I heard the radio hit Renegades by X Ambassadors: on the dusty second story of a Staunton antinque mall, where the tune crackled and snarled through an AM/FM radio with a bad connection. No more than 30 seconds elapsed before I Shazamed it… I was smitten. * […]
When I am lying with my face pressed against somebody else’s photograph …
I used to think that a painting was something you saw with your eyes… that a symphony was something you heard with your ears. I believed this because it was something my art teachers and music teachers had taught me to believe, all my life. I don’t feel that way any more. * Late afternoon. […]
ASHLEY WILSON FELLERS 