It’s ninety-five degrees and the car windows are down. I can feel the skin of my shoulder and arm burning no matter how much sunscreen I apply. The road is a bright zipper splitting my past and present: eastern Washington and childhood; western...
The Letter Last Thursday, I received a longed-for gift: a letter from my dearest friend, she who had called me her ‘other half’. As I eagerly opened the envelope, impersonal in its typewritten formality, my eyes flew to the familiar sprawling signature...
Cronelight? Cronelight. But crones are haggard old creatures with no teeth and hooked noses. Crones, dear heart, are ‘mischievous, cantankerous women’ – Shorter Oxford Dictionary. And if you look a little harder, sweetpea, you’ll see ‘withered...
Modern Minotaurs The labyrinth at Crete was a mansion, its expansive hallways winding each after the other – yet it had only one exit. The Nachusa Grasslands of western Illinois fill 3,500 acres – huge fields of native foxglove and clover – fenced...
Making Bread, New Year’s Day For Tim Shaped like a brain, warm as the flesh of those soft responsive hidden oases for hands (euphemism for buttocks, belly, breasts), the supple dough, culmination of formula and feel— of call of water waking yeast from...
I don’t celebrate holidays. “I celebrate every day,” I say if anyone asks. Mostly, I just prefer to avoid crowds and social pressure. My home reflects this choice for solitude and quiet. I live at the end of a gravel road where all but one or two of the houses I pass...
