“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.
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…