Twenty Minutes
“Where do you suppose Granny is now?” Ben asks. And because this is my logical husband, I know he is wondering where the casket is that we left above ground at the committal service, and not something more metaphysical.
Ben, his sister Elizabeth and I stop by the cemetery before leaving for the airport […]
Six Strands of Separation
I sit in the hair salon, facing myself in the mirror, screaming with laughter. I am with my hairdresser, Lexie, and we’re laughing about something frightening that could have happened to me but didn’t. I laugh at both inappropriate and appropriate times. I laugh when I’m describing things that scared me, hurt […]
The New Normal
Someone has tried to brighten up the room with paper cutouts of watermelons and beach balls. But decorations cannot compete with medical monitors or pods of plexiglass isolettes and tiny metal cribs. I spy my baby, born not two hours ago, the newest resident of the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, Nursery Five.
A […]
Thoughts in the Woods
On my first morning in an isolated cottage in the Appalachian Mountains, I sit on the deck looking into the forest. I look into the higher branches of oaks, tulip trees, sycamores and maples, and through a tiny gap to a distant mountain ridge. I see the rich dark greens of moist […]
Revelations
I stumble and catch myself before I fall. Not bad for a clumsy middle-aged walker in a foreign landscape on an icy March morning. This rocky path winds through a ranchland of brown hills, tottering fences, and emptiness—except for the nearby country club and surrounding homes.
I’m living a new life as a Congregational minister in […]
Radiant Red Violet
It is the last week of summer, a wicked August afternoon that makes your skin drip just from standing still. Megan and I spend the morning as we do most summer mornings. We walk mindlessly through town and mark our names on the walls of buildings with fat black pens. We sneak through […]
Enough
My uncle’s funeral mass is at my childhood church, a large raspberry colored building that towers over my Catholic elementary school. As I sit in the rigid, oak pew listening to the Gospel of Thessalonians memories flood from the pulpit, seeping into my skin through the incensed air. The playground where I broke my hymen […]
Celestial Phenomena
Each year on the eleventh of August the earth splashes through a belt of fractured stones that whirls through our galaxy. I have read that on that one night of the year you can see a shower of meteorites colliding with our atmosphere and burning into dust as they tumble toward earth. […]
Of all the Things I Could Try on for Size…
The day after Christmas, 2007, C, a guy I barely knew, asked me to marry him, and I said yes. As he slipped the ring on my finger and the restaurant burst into applause, we kissed, trying desperately to keep from laughing.
“We are such bitches,” I […]
Condolences, You’re Having a Baby
I’d never be able to have my friend Tracie baby-sit. In fact, I figured she’d probably never visit my house once my daughter was born. But I never thought she’d get hives because of my baby shower, especially since the “shower” was more like a co-ed drunken bash where I was […]
