The sun shone brightly that early summer day as June hung the wash out to dry. Wet fabrics drooped over the edges of the thin white laundry basket and she sang to herself as she hung the baby’s clothes first, the older boys’ next. Tiny outfits, mostly white—a silly color that required extra labor to […]

. . . and watch and listen. I’ve always wanted to be a list keeper. Not like grocery lists, to-do lists, checklists — I already do that — more like bird sightings, state parks visited, daily weather reports. Sometimes I would attempt to keep lists, making a good start but abandoning them after a few […]

Whenever I tell my father a cute or amusing story that exemplifies the glorious weirdness of my kids, he always replies with, “Well, you made them like that.” As if that’s an appropriate response. His tone is never complimentary and it implies that there’s something wrong with them. I become protective and also feel frustrated […]

I was buying a bed as my grandmother lay dying. A bed and matching nightstands, for Christ’s sake, off of Facebook. The passage of time alters memories, but I remember securing the transaction only a moment before I sensed a change in the rhythm of her breathing — the change that signaled her last breath […]

This is a re-telling of a True Story. As a writing exercise, I reimagined a childhood memory from the point of view of someone else who was there. My childhood was fairly normal for the 80s and 90s — barely worthy of an Afterschool Special — but there were a few weird occurrences like this […]

Teenagers are gloriously weird. You can’t know what their mood will be from one day to the next, let alone one minute to the next. Yesterday, my 15-year old (The Musician) was “tired” from “school” (yes, those are air quotes) and while he had enough energy to go shopping with me, he didn’t have enough […]