We never intended to get two. But when we saw Marley in that cardboard box with those big brown cow eyes, there was no way we were leaving without her. We became a two dog family. Dune the yellow alpha, instigator lab, and Marley her chocolate happy-go-lucky sidekick. 

My favorite Marley and Dune story is the one about the slip and slide. I had installed the perfect lawn. I dug up the old yard, leveled it like a pool table, wheelbarrowed a mountain of loom in from the driveway, installed a sprinkler system with measured spray heads for even coverage, and rolled out perfect sod on my hands and knees. It was the kind of green shag carpet grass you take your shoes off to walk on.

My wife and I were away at work. The dogs had the run of the place: side yard, garage, and house. It was just another perfect sunny day until the phone rang. It was Jeffrey.

(continue reading @ chrisellsasser.substack.com )

when you realize there is nothing to say

I know my hearing is bad. Too many summer afternoons grinding paint off of houses, and too many years sitting in the ocean on my board with the wind howling in my ears. And there is the age thing happening to me.

The good news is I am finally starting to listen. Back when I thought I knew everything, I used to only listen to my own voice. Eventually the sound of other voices started to come through, but I still just talked back at them, having only half-listened. Now that I realize how little I know about anything, I am trying to pay attention.

The hardest part about listening for me is turning off my inner voice. I have to consciously stop my own mental chatter to focus on the person speaking. I actually try to picture an open space in my mind for the other voice. Even then, if I don’t occasionally get a question in, I can drift off. Listening is hard work.

I love technology, but I am worried about the impact on listening. The myth of multitasking combined with our ever-communicating phones leaves no space for listening. Talking to someone with their eyes fixed on a screen just doesn’t work. You can see they hear you, but their eyes tell you they are not really listening. I am not worried about pragmatic listening. I know it can impact attention spans at school, cause you to not follow directions, get lost, or not pass the ketchup when asked. 

I worry about the kind of listening that helps people heal.The kind that follows a heavy quiet. The kind where empathy blocks out everything but the other voice. The listening that happens once you realize there’s nothing to say. 

There is something about being listened to that brings peace. It might be knowing that another person cares. It might be the way saying something out loud makes it manageable. It might be the way listening echoes your own voice. It might be the comfort of sharing something too heavy to carry alone. 

My hearing problem has a simple solution: hearing aids. I am not sure how to improve our listening, but it seems like something we should consider. We could all use more space, more uncluttered time, to really listen to each other.

I think that would help with things.

Peace,

Chris

be well, be kind, find joy in your work

the hope of making something new

Each day arrives cloaked in darkness. Black paned glass reflects through opened blinds, anticipating first light. Atop the counter a wheeled mug sits empty. Beans ground and measured. Filter placed. Water reservoired. Click . . . the day begins with waiting. 

My mug was made by local hands, a father and husband, his life shaped by what he could make. The pragmatic sculpted and wheeled into something new. Clay mixed with beach sand. Colors fired. Bellied base, heavy and shaped to fill cupped hands. Rough with an encompassing groove for holding. Rounded lip smoothed by glaze. Each night I set it under the window where the light first breaks.

(continue reading @ Outermost Writing from Cape Cod)

I have been reading The Good Life by Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz. The book shares the findings of the longest scientific study of human happiness. While the general take away is that happiness depends on our relationships, the book opens with a concern about how we compare ourselves to others.

In an effort to promote my writing – part of my reinvention from high school principal into full-time writer –  I have been spending lots of time on social media. I now understand the attraction: everyone else seems to be living the good life.

Of course when you know the person, then the posts look more like bright moments in what you know is far from a perfect life. Even though we know life is often impossibly hard, we still beat ourselves up over falling short in comparison to others. 

These comparisons distract us from examining ourselves: what we love, who we love, what we do best, and our unique qualities. I have always believed each person has something unique to contribute. Troubling that we feel compelled by the media to mimic the talents of others.

So often when we meet someone the question we ask is: What do you do? I wonder how things might change if we started asking this question: What are you interested in? I have been asking that question a lot, and there is always a pause and look of surprise. 

When the answer does come, it rarely has to do with the person’s job. I can’t help but think that we would all be better off if the work we did was driven by the interests we have. Imagine how different things might be. 

Maybe taking an interest in other people’s interests rather than what they do to earn money is worth considering.

Be well, be kind, and find joy in your work.

Peace,

Chris

I watched the moon tonight. Standing in our yard, outside lighted windows, under the December sky, I looked up for as long as I could. 

Haloed light awash in purple clouds. Stars honed by cold. Woods thick with darkness. Breath steaming at the edge of winter. The moon starched white against black sky.

Strange comfort comes from the night sky. Darkness shrinks our world. Stars give us position. Haloed rings of moonlight pull us to the lighted center – a black hole inverted for our exploration. An invitation to follow the rabbit. 

Night air turns us toward warm fires built with split wood and crinkled news from yesterday. Loved ones sheltered behind candle lit windows give no reason to step outside.  But the cold light of the moon calls us to dreaming, and the cool air of night resets us to wondering. Lying back, our eyes lost in space, we see ourselves in the cratered light – flawed and needing others who need us in return. 

I know the moon’s trick. I know it is dark and cold. But it shines just the same. It watches tears wet tombstones. It spies on evil searching for open windows. It shines over strangers becoming lovers. Trapped by gravity it orbits, too weak to break away. But it refuses anonymity, makes do with what it has – the power of reflection. The light of poets, witches, and lovers – it finds its way into myth and magic, shining with affectioned light.

Imagine no moonlight, nothing to howl at, no tides to rise and fall from, no light for walking hand in hand, nothing for the cow to jump over. Imagine the night sky black, empty, no one to watch over us, nothing to light our way. Consider a lifeless and frozen moon cratered with no reflective power. Looking glass shattered.

The light of the moon is not ambitious. It does not strive to be the sun, to rule the day, or to be anything it cannot. It has no light of its own. But who among us shines absent the projected light of another? A warm smile, a kind word, a supportive nod, each shines a light we reflect, illuminating ourselves while shining onto others. A chain reaction igniting the imagination and celebrating the courage to not be more than who we are. 

I stood and watched the moon tonight, then turned to walk away – hoping it was still watching me.  

Peace,
Chris

We story our lives, weaving the strange until it feels familiar. Strangers grow into friends. Places become home. Things take on meaning particular to our living. A back road becomes the setting for a story you love to tell that ends with the tow truck driver asking which of you is the U-boat captain. The woman you first saw wearing a pink sweater and brown boots in the college cafeteria becomes your wife. A shell carried from the beach on a Sunday afternoon becomes important enough to pack when you move away from your childhood home. The cemetery in town becomes the place where your friend is buried. 

__________

I was in elementary school in the 70s. Our street was a culdesac. My bike was a red Vista with monkey bar handles and a banana seat. There were nine of us under the age of twelve in the neighborhood. It was that time in life when summer felt like half of the year, snow meant sledding all day, and leaves were raked for jumping into.

The Steele’s lived at the bottom of the hill, and leaves rake easier down hill than up, so the curb in front of their house was where we built Leaf Mountain. Like a team of seasoned landscapers, we worked in shifts until the pile was eight bikes long and two bikes high.

We took turns racing down the hill and exploding into the pile at top speed to see who could plow through to the other side. We dragged each failed attempt out by the handle bars, the driver spitting leaves with everybody laughing. Then we rebuilt and signaled for the next pedlar. We worked at it all day long. 

__________

When our twins were waist high, fallen leaves meant pile diving. My rake transformed our leaf strewn yard into a pile ready to swallow anyone who dared to venture close. I can still hear their shrieks of laughter as they burst from the pile, leaves clinging to their knit hats and raised mittens, their mother ready with the camera.

A favorite picture of the twins that day hangs in our bedroom. The older one stands behind the younger one, and their heads rest against each other with the scattered pile behind them. One wears a penguin hat. One has shoulder length hair and a smile just as big.  

__________

After high school, fallen leaves meant reunion. No longer connected by the same school or team or neighborhood, Thanksgiving pulled us home. It was the Friday night of the year when we caravanned across beach parking lots. Our talk would begin with the usual favorites: the night we walked down the middle of the highway in the swirling snow laughing; the infamous water tower climb; and the night the cops finally found our bonfire. The old stories lead to new ones about places we had never been and people we did not know – making the outside world feel a little safer.

__________

Today I raked the yard; my wife at work and the twins at school. Just me and our dog. My bike stayed in the garage, nobody burst laughing from the pile, and there was no reunion. But for the whole afternoon I remembered the fallen leaves I had encountered and their stories about friendship, coming home, and being a dad. 

__________

Trees are a miracle.  They make the air we breathe. They ignite the woods with color each fall.  Their bare branches scratch gray winter skies. In spring they burst with the promise of summer. They stand witness to our generations. Imagine the stories they must tell.

The framed photograph of our home taken from space was a wedding gift from a high school friend. I remember one night during our junior year my friend asked when I was going to stop acting like I was just visiting. He had lived on Cape Cod his entire life; I had moved there the summer before my ninth grade.

Every four or five years of my life I have experienced a significant relocation. New school. New neighborhood. New town. New state. Moving is my norm. I learned to carry my home with me, making me more turtle than bear.  

I cannot remember my response that night, but nearly four decades later I know what my answer should have been: never. Being a visitor keeps me awake.

That photograph from space of our home on Cape Cod shows the land stretching into the Atlantic, a single arm, elbow pushing East, fist curled inward – flexing. A defiant spit of land weathering winds, tides, and waves.

If I was an alien traveling through space (my own planet somehow destroyed) and I looked down from my ship to see Cape Cod framed in the window, I would stop searching.  I would pick the outermost stretch of beach as the place to land, settle, raise a family, and live deliberately.

Four decades later, I still feel like a visitor even though I live one street from the house I called home when I was fourteen. I did move away for nearly thirty years, but then found myself returning home one move at a time once I became a father. 

A place can seep into you. No matter where you travel or how long you stay away, there is a pull, a gravity you cannot escape. The land raises you. An ocean horizon calls for dreaming. Winter storms encourage restlessness. The rising and falling of the tides humbles. The slant of light reminds: simply being on this planet, spinning through space with our feet firmly on the ground is a miracle. 

There is an unfinished feel to everything here, a constant effort to rebuild as winds erode and waters rise, our arm of shifting sand and wind-bent scrub pines defying the demise of Atlantis. Barrier fences sink into sand they cannot hold back, bouldered jetties dissolve in winter waves, parking lots break away overnight, and buildings drown. One day there will only be water. 

* * *

Reinvention must be hard for those who live in places built to last. Cemented sidewalks, reflective glass buildings, manicured lawns, and the year round hum of progress. Places where consistency and efficiency outshine change and tinkering. Places where things look the same day, after day, after day. Places where arriving is the end and idling is a sin.

We do not need to move away to live as visitors. We can visit at home by choosing to explore, discover, and celebrate the everyday. The examining light of the visitor shines directly overhead – vanishing the shadow of projections cast by those who claim to know us – definitively. Visiting at home, we unmask until there is nothing left to hide behind.

The common becomes sacred: the glow of the new day breaking, the smell of the wind, the shadows of the trees, the reflections of the water, the sounds of the rain, the last rays of daylight, and the stillness of the night sky. 

To be a visitor at home means never having to leave in search of something more. It means seeing that everything you need is everywhere all the time. It means understanding: you have to make your own peace, be your true self, and see things for what they have to offer.

It began like everything does: in the quiet of the dark. 

Lying there, I imagined the color, the light, the moment it would appear. I could see it crowning the horizon, the pink morning light rising from the ocean, the stage set to begin. I wondered if the idea of it might be enough for now. The room was cold and dark. I could always try again tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow would be better. Maybe I would feel more rested. Maybe the sky would be clearer.

But then, having measured the certainty of that today against unpromised tomorrows, I crawled from under quilted sleep, touched my feet to the floor, shuffled with outstretched arms, navigated the door, and descended – hand clutching the rail. 

Coffee black and mugged, I stood before the kitchen window . . . looking through my reflection. The dark of night haunts from behind. It chases us from the room to the bed and under the covers. It looms at the door to the lighted hallway. It lurks in the places we cannot see: under the bed, behind the closet door, and just outside the window. The dark of morning ushers forward until mirrored windows break with morning light – replacing our reflection with a view of the world.  It clears the way for us – feeding imagination with possibility.

Outside, the sky held stars and the air was still. I broke the quiet with the turning of the ignition. My headlights pierced the dark.

Alone on the road – window open and heater blowing – I straddled the double yellow lines. Driving between day and night, my mind woke, the road looked unfamiliar. In between is where hope takes root, where the possible matures, and the imagination gives shape to dreams. 

I parked against the dunes, turned the ignition quiet and listened for the waves. The door closed behind me – keys dangling from the ignition – my feet broke through the cold morning sand to feel the warm of summer lingering. Walking along the dunes, I found a spot and tucked in from the wind to wait. 

I saw it break the surface. The yellow crown pushing pink sky up into black night – dissolving stars. Then came the blinding light that makes you look away. I raised my hand to shield my eyes so I could see the sky turn to day. The full sun hidden behind the palm of my hand.

The day jolted into full motion. I tried to be heavy, to resist the pull to action. I refused the first step that could distort hope into reality: leave risks unrewarded, calls not received, and the only answer offered – no reply.

I held fast to hope. I let the feeling sink deep enough to intertwine with work and imagination, making a thing that could not be broken – a line strong enough to hold any dream steady against the changing sky. 

I did not travel through the dark that morning to see the sun rise. I traveled for the shuffle across the room, the moment standing before myself in the kitchen window, the smell of the coffee, the feel of the empty road, the sound of the waves, the touch of the warm sand, and the comfort of the dunes. I traveled for everything that happened in between waking and the rising of the sun. 

It began like everything does: by refusing to wait.

Rain rutted and potholed, our dirt road refuses convenience. Pressed rock ebbs and flows against shouldered banks of piled leaves wet with the smell of fall. Narrowed by reaching branches wrapped in thorn-thick vines and choked by climbing ivy, the road feels left behind. 

It begins broken. Crumbled by tires hitting the canyoned mix of dirt and rock cut deep by rain. A moonscape pocked with craters. Trucks bang their way, exploding puddled water, tools clanging in metal beds, cabs jarring side to side. Cars serpentine, brake lights blinking. Walkers step for higher ground.

Puddles mirror sky. Fallen leaves ambered in still water reflect bare branches against drifting clouds. Single drops of rain drip heavy from sagging leaves, plunge into puddles, and ripple rings to ever-widening shores.

Tires bite at loosened stone: graveled orchestras. Hands on wheel, eyes ahead, brake foot ready. Slow is the only way forward. Tale lights glow, then slump and rise, moving from shore to shore through mud puddled water. 

The road swallows everything – light, sound, leaves, branches, stones – a nest of cast offs woven for the weight of travel. 

Rocking back and forth conjures memory. The dirt driveway of childhood. Walks with the dog. The neighborhood without sidewalks or street lights where children played after dark. The smell of burning leaves. The taste of pie made with apples picked and carried home. A kettle whistling for tea. The crack and spark of pine stacked and lit in circled stones. Nights cold enough for coats and hats, but not for mittens. Improvisation – piano, plucked bass, haunting horn – played before a sky draped in sunset.

So much given. A soft start and quiet end to every run. Family walks shoulder to shoulder. Unhurried visits to the mailbox. The neighbor stopped, window down, to say hello. Barefoot months for summer feet. Snow covered days for boots with insulation. Rainy afternoons with puddles overrun, leaving narrow bridges of high ground for crossing. The sound of being home.

The promise of rest: shoes off, feet up, soft seat. Motionless at last. Miles of paved road and hours of travel done. Our landing strip of dirt, an unpaved ending, disruptive and refusing the compromises of convenience. 

Her favorite ball is red and green. Neither poison ivy, nor bramble bush, nor eroding cliff has stopped retrieval of her treasure. It sits in the cup holder of my truck, waiting for the beach.

Last week we enjoyed one of those blue-green days that visits in mid-October: cloudless sky, gentle southern breeze, sun-warmed sand, and ocean water still holding the heat of summer.

We always park at the far end of the lot where she can walk onto the beach wearing nothing but her red collar. I follow, leash draped over my shoulders, bags in one pocket, her ball in the other, and my phone tucked into a third for picture taking.  Dressed for the season above my bare feet, I am layered for wind and snug in sherpa lined sweats, hooded coat, and knit hat.

After serpentine sniffing over seaweed and through broken shells, she makes her way to the tide line. A chocolate lab, always swimsuited and ready for the water – up to her belly anyway. 

I reach into my pocket and throw. Off she goes, racing it down, snatching it out of the air, a hard u-turn, sand flying, the ball proudly displayed, then dropped at my feet. A game we play until her tongue hangs and she drops to her belly – the ball safe between sandy paws. 

Recently, she had found a new game: drop the ball into the water and play fetch with tumbling waves pitching to the undertow. One flaw: she does not like to go in over her head. So when she dropped the ball and the white water did not tumble up, she just stood, belly deep, head cocked, watching her ball roll over the crest and down the trough of the next wave – making a break for Ireland.

Confused, she looked at me, then the ball, then back at me. Into the waves she bound, vanishing when she hit the drop off. Sputtering to the surface, nose reaching for air, eyes wide open, she scrambled to get her footing. Then bucking through the white water, the undertow racing beneath her, she sprinted, tail tucked until she reached dry sand. Safe, she searched the water, turned to me, then back to the water, then stood on her hind legs pawing and barking for a rescue.

In I went, wearing my heaviest sherpa lined sweats, hooded coat, and knit hat. Knee deep my pants flooded. Chest deep, the cold rushed everywhere. Overhead, I began treading.  Cell phone raised in one hand, the other paddling, I could hear her barking. The wind had it now. The race was on. Legs kicking, arm stroking, choking salty chop, I lunged.

Then I was kicking my way back to the beach, one hand holding my phone, the other clutching her ball. Cold water soaked my hat and spotted my sunglasses as I struggled to keep from swallowing another mouth full of wave. She bounced and circled, racing back and forth barking in celebration.

Then it happened: I stood victorious, phone and ball held high overhead . . . and . . . my sherpas dropped. 

There I stood, pants anchored – wishing I had worn anything underneath.