I feel small. And it makes me feel imbalanced. Once feeling large and poised over the summer months with the security of sunny days, familiarity of longer lit hours, and the comfort of happy places at beaches and bike-riding, has now morphed into a perspective that is confined and maybe a little off center. I didn’t realize this until after [...]
I sunk deeper into my seat when watching her on a short Q and A video. I felt her words were directed at me, as if to say, “and you know who you are.” But I dismissed the thought because I didn’t think my publisher’s recommendation for authors to update their websites every two to three years applied to me. [...]
After a lengthy hiatus from writing memoir to write a second book, my first of fiction, I returned to memoir, and recently completed an essay about my mother and I during her final months of life . . . or so I thought. Yes, grief was palpable throughout the paragraphs, yet, when I read the essay a final time before [...]
Early one sticky morning while on a walk through the woods, I tried my dexterity at selfie-videoing (is that what it's called?) I found it takes practice, and an artistic eye. My face moved in and out of the frame, my head moved up and down, though I was not agreeing to anything. Perhaps it was a lack of hand-eye [...]
Before my memoir was published, I did a lot of searching. Not to be confused with a figurative searching of the soul, for connections, for my place in life, but a literal internet search. My due diligence was to see if there were books like mine with similar titles, stories, or themes. I would publish my work in a competitive [...]
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is today. This is an essay I wrote a few years ago and have amended with fresh memories and impressions of a day I spent in remembrance. Sometimes, I like to see my world as being black or white, segregated into neat piles. My tidy thinking and tendency to categorize allows me to understand, to make [...]
winter willow I sat on the floor and pulled the lid from a squat octagonal storage bin, releasing a crisp waft of evergreen. Inside, a trove of trinkets lay in beds of crinkled butcher paper. They varied in size, shape, color—and age. I rummaged through the collection, my fingers becoming sticky from leftover tree sap clinging to the Christmas tree [...]
The sun rose just enough above the horizon that morning to obscure my vision. My morning walk through a path in the woods was brisk in pace and in weather as I carried a load of thoughts from the weeks of stuffing bags with my mother’s clothes to be given to the church, a plastic bin with photographs of her [...]
She handed to me a shoe box patterned in stamps from around the world, only the box wasn’t for shoes but was for photographs, and it wasn’t to hold memories of global travels but to house snapshots of the journeys in years of my family. I had placed it among similar boxes in a narrow closet among unused coffee table [...]
I owe you an apology. I haven’t seen you in two months with no attempt to say hello with even a scribble of a few sentences. We haven’t tangled in sorting mixed words or found clarity in excavating unclear meanings or built a solid structure from a wobbly one in a long time. It’s not that I haven’t thought about [...]