A mass behind my mother’s uterus has brought me to this oncology ward. I learn about debulking a tumor, lymph nodes and a tumor marker test called CA 125.
I will stay the night, sleeping on a makeshift bed fashioned …
Had Robert Frost lived where I do on Lake Norman, would he have written a poem about pine trees and not one about birches? Pine trees are not as limber as the birches that Frost writes about, so no young …
I heard this short tale around a campfire nearly forty years ago, thirty miles deep into the Bob Marshall Wilderness of Montana. Karl was then looking at his mid-seventies and we’d all walked in thirty miles to the China Wall–the …
“Who’s peeling the potatoes?” My dad asked the same question every Sunday morning as my brothers and I emerged from our rooms. The boys knew I’d step up if Dad couldn’t see them, so they’d do a vanishing act. I …
I was peering out the open back window, trying to look into the bedroom directly across from us. Sometimes the lady who lived there neglected to shut her curtains all the way and I got to see her getting dressed …
I never imagined I’d speak at a friend’s funeral before the age of 21.
Her death caught me off guard, though maybe it shouldn’t have. I stood behind the podium in that small Lutheran church, staring into a sea of …
I push forward. I pull back. Push forward. Pull back. Forward. Back. My hand grips the handle of my Shark “ultra-light upright,” walks it through my apartment. White noise constant, silencing my grief-stricken brain. She’s not dead. She’s not dead. …
I don’t know why the liverwurst made me think of my husband. When I took it out of the fridge, I was really looking forward to one of my favorite sandwiches–Swiss and liverwurst on white toast, with mayo. As the …
When I asked my parents for the car to go to the library with Lisa, I was sixteen years old and had been driving for only a few months. They had no reason to doubt me. I was never in …
In early November of 2019, my oldest child told me he had found out in a Google search that his biological mother had died in 2015. An adopted son, he had met his biological mother when he was eighteen—they sat …