She sat on my daughter’s bed, bent forward and fumbling with the gadget on her lap, a thin white line connected it to her ear. Even though I stood across the room, I could hear the music throb. Long black tresses shadowed her face like fingers hiding her eyes, concealing emotion. She yanked one of […]
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A round robin family letter, the kind meant to keep families connected in normal times when coronavirus has nothing to do with being apart pops up in our inbox several times a year. Cousins with blood thick enough to span miles and embrace in-laws, convene together in one compiled letter. Pages long, it’s like the […]
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“The things I do for my kids,” I thought with a half-eaten Big Mac in one gloved hand and piece of wilted lettuce in the other. “But this tops them all.” I stood on a stool leaning into a food court’s garbage bin. I wasn’t happy… Of course, we desperately want them to be happy. […]
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I know well my husband’s furrowed brow. I am well acquainted with the set of his jaw and the far away focus of his eyes. His spinning thoughts, the ones that talk louder inside him than spoken ones addressed to him, need hearing. They are the fix it concentrations of a man named Phil whose […]
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“Oh mom,” my college aged daughter said, and could it be I heard a tiny bit of impatience in her voice? “Half the kids I know in college live in the same town as their parents and they aren’t as close as we are living across the ocean from each other.” My whining stopped. As […]
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“She’s my friend,” my daughter said with a nod. “She doesn’t cheat.” My head shot up. “And some of your friends do?” I asked, thinking at least my six-year-old was on the right side of that conversation. “Sometimes,” she said. Then she ran out of the room. A pinkballerina streak, while I stayed sitting on […]
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Last night I dreamed I was in a crowd of people in a store. We were pressed together in a small space and I knew I was too close. Too near. I woke up wound tight like a mummy and with a headache like a bulldozer had plowed through. A lingering image of trying to […]
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1. What you criticize in others, you likely do yourself. Momma took the lesson a step farther. What you criticize in others you probably are aware of because it’s something you already do in your heart. It was Momma’s form of “get that log out of your eye before you go picking around in someone […]
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“It’s easier to just do it myself,” I mutter. A dishtowel hangs from my hand like a tail swaying against my hip. Chores, those supposedly helpful contributions are about to be my undoing. I re-order the haphazard pile of weeping plastic containers, dry them again, and rearrange the stack neatly in the right cupboard. “Seriously,” I […]
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The long marble hallway stretched like a tunnel ahead. I remember the wavy lines narrowed to another corridor where doctors and nurses passed like a hospital thoroughfare of workers intent on going and arriving. Something weird had happened to my eyesight ever since my daughter had been diagnosed with a brain stem lesion. Dark shadows […]
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