BRUSSELS SPROUTSA CAUTIONARY TALE Photo Courtesy of Jodi Pender 0:00 / 0:00 Brussels Sprouts I used to have impossibly high hopes for family holiday dinners. I blame Norman Rockwell. Remember his painting of a well-dressed family gathered around a flawlessly set table? The children, parents, aunts, uncles, and grandparents sit shoulder-to-shoulder, admiring an unpardoned turkey […]
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THE CELESTIAL VAULT Photo Courtesy of Unsplash Years ago, I read a book that animated and forever changed my creative process. In The Mind of the Maker, Dorothy Sayers says, “It is a universal experience that a work of art has no existence apart from its translation into material form.” That is, people think a
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KILLER ANGELS Our first Christmas tree was a pine branch stuck into a white plastic milk jug. That year, we’d been married for only two months when I came down with meningitis in mid-November. Distracted by my potential imminent demise, my husband, Bruce, did not attempt to decorate. So, on Christmas Eve, a friend
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DREAMING BIGGER 0:00 / 0:00 Dreaming Bigger MEDIUM just published this essay. You can read it below. A while ago, a video made the rounds on Face Book. In it, a virtual Santa on a large screen greeted passengers in an airport lobby. As the folks had their tickets scanned, the Santa asked what
HOLDING VIGIL:FOSTER CARE Photo Courtesy of Atharva Tulsi 0:00 / 0:00 Holding Vigil One result of the overturn of Roe v. Wade will be that many more children will be entering foster care, a system that is already underfunded and overwhelmed. Years ago, at my first job out of college, I saw firsthand how a
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DISPLACED Photo Courtesy of Farid Ershad 0:00 / 0:00 Displaced Mid-August last year, when Fatema* answered her cell phone, she heard her sister Shaima’s frantic voice, “I’m at the airport. Can you bring me my passport right now?” Not a simple request. On a normal day, it would have been dangerous for Fatema, who was
EINSTEIN ON TIME Photo Courtesy of Taton Moise 0:00 / 0:00 Einstein on Time I can’t pretend to understand what Einstein meant when he said that time was an illusion. In fact, I can’t pretend to understand much of what Einstein said. What I do know is that living during these Covid years has shifted
BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES Photo Courtesy of Hans Isaacson 0:00 / 0:00 Bonfire of the Vanities Twenty years ago, a reporter called me with bizarre news, so bizarre that I instantly wrote him off as a prank caller. He claimed he was from a town out West, maybe in Colorado? I am fuzzy on the
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PIVOTING INTO 2022 0:00 / 0:00 Pivoting into 2022 This past Thanksgiving, all our grandkids were visiting. At one point, three-year-old Bea and four-year-old Hank decided to prepare for an imaginary beach trip. Hank packed several face masks into his yellow leather bag and Bea jammed a bunch into her blue vinyl
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MY BRIEF LIFE OF CRIME Jean De La Bruyere says, “If poverty is the mother of all crimes, lack of intelligence is their father.” This was true in my case. My first brush with crime happened when I was eight years old. At the time, we lived across from my school, Smalley Elementary. Weekdays, as
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