Leave your orange flight suit, the one you wore testing how low and fast you could fly above the trees. Leave your leather bomber jacket with ...
Category My House
Photograph (1974)
I am thirteen, wearing my brother’s long denim shirt with the pearly snaps over my gymnastics leotard, and my red elephant bell-bottom pants with ...
The Most Interesting Cat in the World
I spent most of this morning alternating between feeding him small plates of canned salmon, and picking him up, cuddling him, whispering that I ...
An Abundance of Cats
“You know, you have real, live cats,” my husband says. I know this. I also know that I’m not allowed to have any more cats. Four is the limit, ...
I’ll Take You There
Up in here, lyin’ to the races (I’ll take you there) —The Staple Singers My brother asked me to write about Mary Lou’s ...
Hair Theory
When I got home from work today, my husband was standing in the kitchen with a quizzical expression on his face. “What?” I asked. ...
It could be magical
A hoarfrost covered our yard this morning and I’ve been resisting the temptation all day to feel morose. Winter has become harder. I ...
Survival Skills
She winds a manual can opener around one end of an empty Hi-C tin, the 46-ounce container that probably held grape or orange pineapple juice. She ...
Oh, Olan Mills
At Blendon Woods, a metro park outside Columbus, the Olan Mills photographer directs us to run up a small embankment toward him. We stop at ...
Mostly True Stories: My Irrational Hatred of a Glass Table
Not long after my parents divorced and my mother took all of her antiques, my father came home with a set of furniture. He had a talent for ...
On Belonging
This memory belongs to me and I belong to it. It is as blurry as a watercolor. I remember a house and the property upon which it sat and the ...
When the Snow Melts
The last thing my sister wrote to me before she died was that we would see each other again, “when the snow melted and the mountain pass” between ...