Randell Jones
Daniel Boone Footsteps
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6-minute Stories

Everybody loves a good story
Listen to these 6-minute stories
from both new voices and experienced writers
from the Personal Story Publishing Project anthologies:
Bearing Up , Exploring , That Southern Thing , Luck & Opportunity,
Trouble , Curious Stuff , Twists and Turns , Sooner or Later , and Now or Never.
Copies of all 10 books in the series available here.
“6-minute Stories” episodes announced on Facebook @6minutestories

"Love in the Clouds" by Phyllis Castelli

 – like trying to save a handful of magic

A change in perspective changes everything. 

 

Phyllis Castelli returned to her North Carolina hometown after retiring from her music career. She loves to spend time with her lifetime special interests:  writing, music, photography, a pollinator garden, and Black Labrador Retrievers. Phyllis is interested in creating projects that knit together the beauty of all those favorites. Phyllis’s poems and essays have appeared in Quillkeepers Press, The Avocet, Scarlet Leaf Review, and Tar River Poets, among others. As a very young poet, she published Gentle, I Think, a book of poems with pen and ink illustrations.

Author’s Talk

Phyllis Castelli

Even the magic of being in love can suddenly become difficult to navigate.

There is no GPS for marriage, no neutral well-meaning voice warning that a detour is ahead, or the rest area is closed for repairs. When my husband and I went the wrong way in our marriage, we were lost without breadcrumbs, like Hansel and Gretel in the fairy tale.

We headed to the mountains like children running away from home, tugging our hearts along like tattered teddy bears. We were ready to fall in love again, but only when we stood atop a very high mountain could we see the fullness of life. In The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupery said, "One sees clearly only with the heart. What is essential is invisible to the eye." I believe this to be true, especially when we often forget to look. It's all about opening the curtains and letting in light. The whole vivid world is just beyond the windowsill.

As a writer, I have struggled to recognize stories to tell, even though I know they surround me. Working on this piece taught me to look for them tucked into the layers of everyday life, folded in with blankets and towels, or tumbling out of the kitchen junk drawer. I have always thought stories help us turn corners in our thinking. A good story might help us see ourselves as children sipping tea with an imaginary unicorn in the garden or, as we are now, all grown up and wistfully longing for the day the unicorn came for tea.—Phyllis Castelli

Randell Jones