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The Wizard of Awe
I have lived my entire life in the grip of fear. When artist Georgia O’Keeffe, the Mother of American Modernism, the woman whose decades-long career would transcend conventional art movements of her time, made this startling statement in 1938, I like to imagine that she spoke across time and space directly to me. I’ve been Read more
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Food Memories: Prose Poems with Homemade Images
1 According to one of our family legends, one winter during the Depression my maternal grandmother fed her nine children nothing but turnips. One of her uncles, a farmer, gave them to her, fearing that otherwise her family would starve. He’d grown them to feed to his pigs. As adults, all of her children vowed Read more
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Nourishing Love Later in Life
For me, late November always brings with it a host of memories, bad and good. Recollections from my childhood of my mother’s volatility during the holiday season. Her seeming disdain for Thanksgiving and Christmas–perhaps because of their added demand on her as the manager and keeper of our house. Memories of the holidays when my Read more
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My Long Overdue Talk with Mom
When your final illness ended and you were gone, I brought your ashes into my home. I placed them in an urn — one that would rest easily on a bookshelf or mantel, one that would be inconspicuous, that would blend in with my other belongings and perhaps go unnoticed by visitors. I decided to Read more
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“Betcha Can’t”: The Dare That Fed My College Romance
Tall and muscular, Jake had a ready laugh and boyish smile. An enticing blend of artist, musician, and athlete, he caught my eye during my freshman year of college. He and I were enrolled in some of the same courses, where we discovered that we had grown up near each other, just a few streets Read more
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Gear Up, Slow Down, or Cruise? My Quest for a Meaningful Retirement
I’m sitting in the community room at the public library. Beside me to my left: a seventy-three-year-old man whose wife is in a hospice unit facing end-of-life decisions. To my right: a sixty-four-year-old woman, still working but looking ahead to life beyond her career. We are at the library for an information session on Medicare. Read more
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