Tag: family
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Fodder for Retrospect
The limp expression on his face was nothing new, but it still tore gently into Monica’s chest each time she looked at her son. With each tear in the fabric of motherhood, she buried the urge to give up, to send him to another doctor, to admit to the nagging suspicion that she might be…
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Knee-high by the Fourth of July
On the opposite side of the road passed the third pickup he’d seen that afternoon donning an oversized American flag waving in the blackened air behind the cab’s smokestack exhaust pipes. Patriotism, he thought as stomach acid warmed his chest, muddied and misled. The giant flag, strung from a 4’’X4’’ wooden post, flapped in animated…
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Observing a Sneeze
Leaving the country for the summer can be kind of a big deal for 15-year-old girls. While it is not always the case, a venture like this can be a game-changer, moreover, a life-changer; going to Rome for three weeks of the three months of freedom between academic years did more than alter her worldly…
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Depressive Tempests
“The madness of depression is, generally speaking, the antithesis of violence. It is a storm indeed, but a storm of murk.” – William Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness It is never so simple to say, “listen here, this is an exact depiction of mental illness,” as is it not simply the case in…
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Willow Creek
I remember when Stacy and I would go down to Willow Creek to skip rocks. I’d get mine all the way across; hers would only travel about half the way before descending out of view. “No one’ll ever try to skip that one again,” I’d say as the stone tucked itself in to the muddy…
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The Webber’s Sorrow
For the malice Nature thrusts upon us no remedy exists. Time, I have come to believe, is the closest aid in relieving the pain of those circumstances in life over which man has no control. Although time is a concept, an unseen hand in its own nature, it is a healer. What comes to mind…
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Doe Re Meandering
It’s still not clear to me exactly what I was doing driving around that night and when it comes down to hard facts, I could care less. I spent a number of purposeless hours behind the wheel during those months. Maybe it was the result of a living in a small town past my prime…
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The Goddess Who Lives on the Dirt Road off Route 12
Every morning, on my drive to school, I see her waiting for the yellow bus to come and haul her off to St. Paul’s School for Girls. She wears a red and blue plaid skirt and a navy blue sweater vest because that’s what all the girls have to wear at that place. I drive…
Sophisticating the Rudimentary 