Category: Uncategorized

Dawn crept over St. Augustine, Florida like a hangover on November 6th as I hobbled down my front path to retrieve my Harris/Walz yard sign. Trump had won, and my garden – a nightmare tangle of Chinese Fans, Seminole Hibiscus, and Slash Pines – seemed to mirror the nation’s chaos. The plants had grown wild…

In the shadow of cathedral bells, they force-fed us their stories— conquistadors’ gods wrapped in gold, reservation saints bound in barbed wire. We stumbled through their maze of white-washed history, nearly committed for asking why. They might have listened when we offered our empty pockets, our full hearts beating like drums in the streets. Instead,…

The morning of his second election, before waking up my screens went dark in protest— graphite escaped from splitting pencils while ink dried in abandoned pens and keyboards froze solid refusing to type the horror. Before dawn could find me I lay counting breaths letting panic seep away like thunder fading into morning silence while…

As a landscaper, I’m drawn to water’s transformative power. In childhood, my fascination began with storm drains where rain mixed with sewage and oil, creating toxic urban springs. I dreamed of purifying these flows, channeling them through gravel beds and filtering bogs until they became crystalline pools cascading down woodland slopes. Last night, I found…

The sun glints amber through our east-facing screen porch, but something’s wrong. “It looks like it’s setting,” I tell Dave, moving only my lips while he flips through “New Scientist.” We wear dark glasses in the September dawn, watching our North Florida backyard jungle and our cats weaving between us. I sit motionless as an…

“You know you wouldn’t be half bad if you got better,” my mother said of my singing when she was ninety-five. Though I’d heard it subliminally throughout my life, dementia had stripped her filters, making her frankness almost endearing. A decade earlier, I’d discovered music could redirect her endless questions about going home. Standards drew…

Though I’d dreamed of Judy Garland’s spotlight, my origin story played out in a storm drain pipe behind our Stamford home. No makeup towels or footlights – just daddy long legs and gravel echoing in a dank vortex beneath my hands and knees. When they found me, the cop’s gentle tone told me what I…

Brunswick School for Boys was founded in 1902 Greenwich, Connecticut to prevent the “softening” of privileged masculinity. By the 1960s, when I attended, their Victorian ideals persisted. Behind the motto “Courage, Honor, Truth,” the Brunswick Bear logo’s unspoken mission was to prevent boys from becoming “fags.” We marched single file through creaking hallways in brown…

When Hurricane Esther formed off Africa’s western Sahara in September 1961, I was already intimate with turbulence. The newly launched TIROS satellite tracked her 150-mph winds as she teased the Eastern Seaboard – much like my mother’s moods swept through our Stamford, Connecticut household, unpredictable and fierce. Our stretch of privileged coastline, that gilded nipple…

I’m not surprised Dave and I rushed to get our house listed before the height of hurricane season. Our reasons, like Freudian slips swirling off the coast of Africa, mixed with our asking price, growing interest rates, politics, and “back to school” market lethargy, resulted in no traffic during three open houses. Our realtor chose…