So excited to see the photo of my kids on the cover of this lovely print magazine. Essay tells the story of my son as a new dad and his endeavor to get his wife to the hospital in what might have been an emergency. I am so proud of him as a parent!
As we age, our experience with beauty and nature can become more precious, if we are open. This is especially true as we confront the fragility of our own human frame. The theme of this journal was “inhale, Exhale” and, in my life, I grow to appreciate the blessing of each breath, in and out.
“One Wedding and a Funeral” is an essay, representing a chapter of my upcoming memoir, about being the mother of Seattle cop during the days of the Defund Movement. It sadly tells the story of one young police officer who lost her life serving her community during this time (in a separate incident) and what that means to me as a cop mom.
Marion, Indiana is a struggling rust belt town up SR 69 from Indianapolis. The Mississinewa River is the prettiest geographic feature of the city, and Matter Park stretches for green miles along it. Marion was my home for seventeen years. Most days, I walked along the river, looking for blue herons standing on one leg in the shallows. Then I crossed over a little hill in the park to visit a memorial to the young soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wandered along the curved pathway and said a silent prayer for each of the dead boys represented by the eight plaques that line its bricked sidewalk.
The pain of the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel has colored the lives of most Jewish people since that date. And yet, our family experienced the most blessed joy of all in the birth of our first grandchild. This essay tries to combine these two aspects of our lives.
“Confessions of an Eczema Mom” is the story of my relationship with my teenage daughter as we struggled together to deal with an unbearable disease. She is now a successful adult and I am proud of her management of her years both of physical pain and her ability to take care of her health so she can thrive.
“In Mary Oliver’s “Music Lessons,” the piano teacher exchanges places with the student. As her fingers hit the keys, “Sound became music, and music a white / scarp for the listener to climb / alone…..”
This August, I was privileged to have my essay, The First Baseball Game of the Season, published in Pure Slush Anthology: Lifespan Vol. 6, Marriage. Pure Slush is an independent publisher of fiction and non-fictional works from authors worldwide, and has been home to hundreds of shorts, essays and prose since it’s creation in 2010.
On the day before the world shut down, we made a last run to our local bookstore. On the discount rack I found a copy of James Beard, The Theory and Practice of Cooking. I read through the classic and made a few of the recipes over the next few months, but mostly I bought it because it was one of the books that was always on my Aunt Janice’s shelf, in the family room off the modern, galley kitchen, over the built-in, “L”-shaped white couches…
