July 12, 1967 Dear Esel, After your bus left, I couldn’t face the apartment, so went to the cycle shop. Maybe mindless people could make me forget. No hope. I finally got the strength to sulk back
Read more →Family and Friends
Two little girls stand in an open field, close to each other but not touching. I’m the straight-haired girl with glasses, 7 years old, wearing a wool coat with plaid trim. The dark-skinned girl wears overalls with
Read more →Rushing toward Strong Hospital in 2008, I call the pulmonologist, the oncologist, the cardiologist, and our family doctor. “Should we put your husband on a ventilator?” they ask me. “Can you give him chemo after he nearly
Read more →I lie in the dark in my lover’s arms listening to his slow sleeping breath. I’ve known him just a few months, but he’s the man I want to marry. A streetlight on West Seneca Street beams
Read more →In 2010, eighteen months after my husband died, I longed for relief from constant sorrow, so joined three friends for an adventure to Gasparilla Island, Florida. Instead of sunshine and warmth, we faced unusually cold, cloudy weather,
Read more →“I hear a baby calling,” I said to my husband Vic in 1970. After a day at Big Basin Redwoods State Park, we were driving toward the tiny stucco house we rented near a walnut orchard and
Read more →The sky darkened from dusk to inky blue. Disco the sweet black pup became an exhausted brat jumping on my old dog Willow, biting at the leash when she went out for a last pee, mad with
Read more →My friend Barb Cook shared a video of six squirming black puppies. I watched as a vet checked each one before handing it to an assistant for comfort. I’d wanted a pup for a year, but it’s
Read more →“I don’t want to move to Canada,” I said to my boyfriend Vic in 1967. “I don’t want to move either, but I don’t want to go to a war I don’t believe in or go to
Read more →I’m excited about the spark in this week’s writing class! A food spark gives me delicious ideas. But first, I have to take out these ten monarch caterpillar babies from the large box Elaine gave me. I’ll
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