Marti Healy

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Oh, Wow!

“Oh, wow!” she kept saying, in that breathless sort of wonder that can be heard only in the voice of youth and innocence. “Oh, wow!” Her tiny nose and hands pressed against one store window and then another. She pointed to counter after counter filled with candy. And then several displays of plastic eggs. And scenes of stuffed bunnies and yellow chicks and woven baskets of every size. Even a stack of nothing more than colorful socks caused her to express delight. “Oh, wow!” she said, again and again, as her tiptoes carried her from place to place, store to store, joy to joy. She is only two-and-a-half years old,

Dogs Riding in Cars

I suspect it may be the reason most dogs keep us around. We can drive cars … and trucks and motorhomes and motorcycles. And, as a result, we can seemingly create the very wind itself. To the senses of dogs riding in cars, I suspect it seems we can also somehow make all the best smells float on the air at once, with a cacophony of new and familiar sounds intertwined and changing every few seconds. We magically bring farms with fields of horses into view before they dash past us with glorious speed. We find new people to watch walking and riding bikes, and other dogs to call out

More Power To Your Elbows

It’s more British than American. And it likely originated as a toast. The phrase “more power to your elbows” meant you lifted your comrades up to continued good fortune, with many more celebrations to come (so their elbows would therefore be bent in many more celebratory toasts). But now, “more power to your elbows” is most often just said in recognition of a thing well done, with hope for even more successes. A sort of quirky wish for “good luck.” I am quite smitten with the phrase. But when it comes to traditions of good luck, I suspect most of us are more familiar with the “bending of our elbows”

Scraps of Love

It is a rather small scrap of simple cotton cloth. It is faded cream in color with a pattern of soft blue leaves printed across it. And it is fastened onto a large page of paper, along with half-a-dozen other small lengths of different bits of cloth and folds of ribbon. The page is one of many pages, bound into a very large, very old, book. And there are rows and rows of books just like it. And they are shelved and preserved within the Foundling Museum in London, England. England in the 1700s was constantly wet, slicked and grimed, bone-deep cold, with steel-colored skies and frozen rivers, struggling through

All The Little Foxes

It made me think of the wasted opportunities that are lost to little foxes of “doubt” — about stories never written, journeys never taken, loves never known, truths never told — because of the little foxes of doubt nibbling at the edges of our confidence and courage. “Little foxes,” she said. My friend and I were walking with dogs. It was early morning, late autumn. We were discussing everything and nothing. And we were not walking too near to each other, which somehow prohibits the natural sharing of confidences. But we had been talking about something — I can’t remember exactly what — that concerned small worries, the kind that

To Keep Christmas Well

“…and it was always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas well …” It is among the closing lines from Charles Dickens’ classic story, “A Christmas Carol.” It may be one of the best remembered and most cherished sentences in the book. “To keep Christmas well,” I suspect, implies different things to each of us. But in the language of the day when this book was written, it meant to observe, or to honor, or to celebrate something. To actively remember. Perhaps in this year of rather lopsided “celebrations” — with their often double-edged experiences and wobbly sense of imbalance — I have found myself searching for

A Tradition of Women

There is a decades-old tradition among the people of the Hawaiian Islands — among the women specifically, and those of Polynesian descent in particular — to take to their boats and pay tribute to their ancestors in a challenging and meaningful annual event. They race in outrigger canoes between the shores of two islands across wildly open ocean waters. And when they do so, they honor their mothers and grandmothers and all the women who have gone before them, and become an example for all those to come. They use only their own human strength: the power of their arms and backs, their wrists and hands and legs, their will

Celebrating The Bruises

I have a friend who is wonderfully strange and tender, beautiful and wise. My friend’s name is Mar. “We are wonderfully resilient after all, you and I. From kicked shins to punched hearts. So I suspect that we should be prouder of our bruises.” Not long ago, Mar shared on social media a photo of bare legs. More to the point, they were bare legs covered in bruises. They were Mar’s own legs, battered and bruised from moving into a new home. And they reminded my friend of the good old roller derby days when bruises and bumps were a daily occurrence and much more massive than those showing in

Imagine being in stars with Butterflies

We can fill our time of living “in stars” with kindness and justice and all good things and right actions. They’re called “instars.” And they’re phases of time in the life of an insect. I think it is a perfectly compelling name, a perfectly intriguing idea. Instars. In … stars. As if it is time spent inside a star. Instars are, in fact, those times of living and being that take place between two transitional stages of an insect’s development — between two periods of molting. Like the times between when a caterpillar transforms into a chrysalis, and when it transforms again from a chrysalis into a butterfly. Living in

Hatching Stones

Most of us have had those situations in life, I suspect, when we have taken a stand, made a “hasty nest” and clung to it, regardless of its rightness or wrongness or advisability, or even its danger to us or its potential harm to others. The soft gray-brown little dove was watching us. But she wasn’t moving. Quincy the dog and I stood at a respectful distance from the sweet little bird as she rested, perhaps nesting, on the ground. It was an ill-chosen place for a nest, I thought — on the corner of a driveway, only slightly under a protective bush, deeply shaded, but terribly open, vulnerable. I