I used to look in the mirror and see my father. Now it's my mother who stares back.
I used to look in the mirror and see my father. Now it's my mother who stares back.
Whoosh! The iridescent flame ascended the sleeve of my navy Nautica sweater quickly, and I realized too late that I had brushed the hot Bunsen burner.
They weren’t Lees with the wave of stitching on the back pocket that the coolest girls wore. But as I checked out my backside in the mirror on my closet door, I didn’t care.
We missed our appointment after lingering at a fixer-upper full of possibilities, some magnificent, others terrifying. The agent made us wait outside.
I found her at the kitchen table with a yellow legal pad.
Big mistake, I think, treading rough surf on an unguarded beach in Maui. The water’s too deep for a little boy, too wild for a grown woman who still doggy paddles.
The driver was trained for this, and I was high in the back, protected. But then, there it was.
“I was a drummer,” he insisted, drawing my attention from his bulging belly, skin taut like a snare but less tympanic. My first solo paracentesis had history, jangling my nerves.
I ran barefoot across the street and yelled, “I’m a pediatrician! It’s going to be okay.” It wasn’t okay.
The phone’s ring pierced my mental fog as I lay in the hospital room.
“Alexa,” I call out. “Set the timer for five minutes!”
We’re scared of waves slinking up the shore, with each salty breath gasping and spitting foam …
I said I’d foster one adult cat, yet here I am taking three.
My seven-year-old and I arrive at our traditional pumpkin patch. She picks out a huge, tall monstrosity.
I climb aboard the giant orange pillow, socks sliding on the rubber, and find my spot in the jostling hordes.
My dad rented out part of a resort. Loot bags, each waiting to be taken home by a party guest, stand neatly arranged in rows, like soldiers on a training field.
A hand-stenciled sign planted beside the tree read, We must live together as brothers or perish together as fools. Martin Luther King, Jr.
I was anxious and bumbling. Compulsively feeling his forehead for fever. Joining him in crying jags.
Father motions her behind the steering wheel. We’re on the field he graded with a landing strip in mind, so where’s the harm?
My loving, difficult sister offered to come the weekend before my first child’s birth.