We let Michael name you. He called you Buddy, and you were his fine and loyal friend; but there will always be a part of me that believes you were a Gimli, dignified and stoic in your short, stout frame. You were young, and so was Michael, the year I made you wear matching red […]
Read More →Our contact had been minimal since the Christmas holidays. I was disillusioned by what appeared to be his indifference to her need for help and her refusal to help herself. My parents were united only when they badgered me to come back to church, their church. The way I saw it, they were asking me […]
Read More →The break in the weather should not come as a surprise, yet it does. Every year I forget there will be a January thaw. Today, for the first time in weeks, I move from intention to action. The labyrinth walk I have meant to do since the New Year happens today. Luck is on my […]
Read More →A few nights ago, I was folding laundry before bed and questioning my husband, a forensic accountant, about terms that are used to describe massive fraud. He said I might be looking for the word looting, as in the systematic looting of a company’s assets. I was thinking of the whole country, not a […]
Read More →The story excerpted from my 30-year-old copybook ends where it began, in the airport in Pittsburgh. A warm October evening had replaced the cold January night when I’d imagined skating away along Prophecy Creek, only dimly aware that my marriage was ending. Now I sat at a different gate waiting for another flight back to […]
Read More →Last night, my sleep was fitful. By 4:00 a.m., I was wide awake. The episode is not unexpected at this time of year. Twenty-four years ago today, I woke up at sunrise on a concrete bunk in Santa Theresa, the women’s prison in Guatemala City. I had survived the events of the previous day: a […]
Read More →A few weeks ago on a Saturday night, I waited in line at the Marriott in downtown Lancaster for the chance to meet the renowned memoirist, Mary Karr. She had just finished the keynote address at HippoCamp 2016, the creative nonfiction conference sponsored by Hippocampus Magazine and organized by Donna Talarico-Beerman and company. Anyone who […]
Read More →The way one hot day runs into another in July makes me anxious. I lose the sense that time is moving forward. August brings relief, a reawakening. Even if the heat doesn’t end, the late afternoon light mellows and the animal self knows instinctively that summer is slowly descending towards fall. For me, it […]
Read More →Music summons memories. A few bars of a song are enough to make us remember where we were and how it felt, physically and emotionally, to be in a particular place and time. Lulu singing To Sir With Love commands my full attention the same way it did when I was 12. Play Yellow Submarine, […]
Read More →One morning last week, after another night of disrupted sleep, I stood in the kitchen before 6:00 a.m., unable even to choose a mug for my tea. The words “When I drink from the blue cup that is all that I do” came into my head, shaken loose by the early hour and the weariness […]
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