DW's Blog

Hope Minus The E

by DW Green — August 5, 2026

“On the Difference Between a Wish and a Hope.”

Professor Tracey

In the fall of 1968 I was a freshman, and I was not at all sure I belonged there. My English professor was a woman named Ann Tracey, a University of Wisconsin graduate, and for reasons I did not understand at the time, she decided to believe ...

by DW Green — July 29, 2026

“On the Element I Have Loved All My Life.”

THE SMELL OF IT

I can smell it as I write this. Wet ground. The particular scent that rises when rain meets dry earth, or when a river runs cold over stone and lifts its dampness into the air. I knew it first as a boy — on

Webster Street, on Holland Court, down by the running water of Colorado — and I know it still, cold and warm at once, the river and the earth and something of my own mingled into a single breath. Of all the things a life gives you to remember, the smell of wetness is near the very top of mine. It turns out the thing even has a name, and the name is a small revelation. Petrichor. The scientists built it from two Greek words: petra, stone, and ichor, the shining fluid the ancients said flowed in the veins of the gods. The smell of wet earth is, if you take the word at its own meaning, the blood of the gods in the stone. I have been breathing something the old world thought divine, all my life, and calling it, humbly, wetness. My nose knew it was holy long before I had the word. So let me ...

by DW Green — July 22, 2026

“ Mrs. Ferdale, Calling Into the Dusk.”

A VOICE ACROSS THE YARDS

Somewhere around dusk, on an ordinary evening of my boyhood, a woman down the block would open her door and call out into the neighborhood.

“Oh, Sylvia. Oh, Sylvia. Come home for dinner.”

That was Mrs. Ferdale. I can hear her still, and I am seventy-five years old. Here is the strange part, the part that has kept the memory alive when a thousand louder things have gone: I never met Sylvia. Not

once. I do not know if she was a daughter, or a cousin, or a girl I simply never crossed paths with, or — I have wondered this my whole life — something closer to a figment, a name I heard so often in the falling light that I built a whole girl out of it. She was called home every evening, and I never laid eyes on her.

A boy standing in a front yard, hearing a name called for someone he cannot see. I did not know it then, but I was being handed the whole thing, fr...

by DW Green — July 15, 2026

“On the Mustard Seed, and Why Smallness Is the Greatness.”

“On the Mustard Seed, and Why Smallness Is the Greatness.”

A FOURTH OF JULY PLATE

This is the third time I have written to you for the country’s two hundred and fiftieth birthday, and the last. First I tried simply to receive it — to hold the whole vast gift of America with open hands and say thank you. Then I went looking for what the gift was actually made of, and the word that came back was liberty. This last time, I want to go all the way back — to the size of the thing when it started. The thought arrived, of all places, over lunch.

On Saturday July 4th, I sat quietly with a paper plate: a hamburger, a scoop of potato salad, and yes, baked beans. It is not a meal anyone would call grand. It is about the humblest plate a person can

assemble — and it is, somehow, the exact taste of a nation’s birthday. I sat there eating it, two hundred and fifty years into the experiment, and a small thought arrived and would not leave. It grew, the way

the goo...

by DW Green — July 8, 2026

“On the Word a Revolution Was Born From.”

“On the Word a Revolution Was Born From.”

A WORD WORTH THE TROUBLE

Last week, for the country’s birthday, I wrote about receiving the nation — about holding this vast and undeserved gift of a country with open hands instead of clenched fists, and simply saying: thank you, I receive it. I meant every word. But a gift asks a question that the thank-you does not answer. Received what, exactly? What is this gift actually made of?

I have been scratching my head about that ever since, and the answer kept coming back as a single word — the one carved over this whole occasion, the one men have died for who could not have defined it. Liberty. If last week was about the posture, the intentional act of receiving, this week is about the gift itself, and the strange weight folded inside it. The two go hand in glove. You cannot rightly receive what you have never troubled to understand — and I found, to my own surprise, that I could not have told you plainly what this gift even was. So I did what I have learned to do with any word that matters: I took it apart, for some words are so freighted, so ...

by DW Green — July 1, 2026

Divine presence extends far beyond nature’s grandeur…

“A Birthday Blessing for America at 250.”

TWO ANNIVERSARIES

I have now stood at two of these.

In 1976 the country turned two hundred and I was twenty-five. There was bunting on every porch, tall ships in the harbors, a whole nation leaning out its windows to wave at itself. I waved back. I was young enough to think the celebration was about the past — about what had been built and won and signed.

Now the country turns two hundred and fifty and I am seventy-five. Half a century has passed for the nation and half a life for the man, and we have arrived at the same birthday from opposite ends of a great deal of weather. I have learned a few things in the fifty years between the two parties. The main one is this: the anniversary was never about the past. It is about what we are still being given — and whether we have the courage to receive it.

THE SECOND WORD

We are the land of the free and the home of t...

by DW Green — June 24, 2026

“This past Monday the sun reached the top of its long stair and stood still — the longest day of the year, the most light there is.”

“A Meditation for the Summer Solstice”.

The Longest Day

This past Monday the sun reached the top of its long stair and stood still — the longest day of the year, the most light there is.

Since the dark bottom of December it had been climbing — a little higher each noon, a little longer each evening, the light leaning ...

by DW Green — June 17, 2026

“A Walking Stick Report.”

The Thank-You

It began, as these things do now, with something small. A thank-you — a letter to Stan Frizzell, the neighbor of my boyhood and, though it took us the better part of a lifetime to find each other, one of the truest friends I have ever had. Thank you for the blessing of your friendship, I wrote him. And as I set that last word down, it came apart in my hands.

I had unpacked others this year. Interabiding split clean down the middle into inter and abiding, and the seam was the sermon ...

by DW Green — June 10, 2026

“Inter means between. Among. Mutually. Abide means to dwell, to stay, to remain. Put them back together and the word is not a piece of jargon. It is a definition wearing a disguise. To inter-abide is to dwell-between — to have your being in the space that joins you to another, not in the lonely fortress of yourself.”

“On the Words Whose Meaning Lives in the Between”.

It began with an injury and a slip of the hand, which is to say it began the way most true things do — sideways, unplanned, through the crack rather than the front door.

This morning I dropped a gate fob into that thin, merciless slot between the car seat and the console, and in fishing it back out I peeled a strip of skin off my right hand. The writing hand. It bled out of all proportion to the wound, the way hands do. And then, because the work does not wait for the body, I sat down to write anyway — and somewhere in the typing, my nicked hand let a word come apart that I had always seen whole.

Interabiding.

It split under my fingers into two pieces. Inter. Abiding. And in the space where it broke open, the whole teaching was standing there, waiting — as if it had been h...

by DW Green — June 3, 2026

“A Boy, His Grandfather, and the Heroes Who Paid for the Show”

There was a Saturday afternoon, somewhere in the late 1950s, when the most important room in the world was Grandpa Green’s living room and the most important square in the world was the one inside it on the television set. The console TV hummed for a minute before the picture came in. Grandpa in his chair. Me on the floor, or on the couch beside him, depending on the day. A bowl of something to share. The announcer cranking the drama up to eleven before the bell had even rung. And then — the ring. Four corners. Four turnbuckles. Three ropes stretched between them. A square of canvas inside a square of ropes, suspended above a wooden frame, lit so brightly you could see the sweat already gathering on the wrestlers’ shoulders. The matches began. So did the lifelong education I didn’t know I was getting.

The Roster

Some names live in a different room of memory than ordinary names. They’re not stored. They’re kept.Dick the Bruiser. Voice like a gravel truck. Crewcut. Built like the steel mills of Gary, Indiana, where he probably should have stayed if anyone had given him the choice. The kind of heel who’d come up on you slow and then explode.Cowboy Bo...

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