BETTER LIVING THROUGH DUCT TAPE Photo Courtesy of Jo Szczepanska My Duct Tape essay just appeared in The 30th Anniversary Anthology of the Blue Ridge Writers. Here is a excerpt: The Latin words ductus tapeicus translate to cures all evils. Those words should be displayed on our family crest. Both sides of our family have […]
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MAYHEM WASPS Photo Courtesy of James Wainscott 0:00 / 0:00 Mayhem Wasps In this year of our Lord 2020, I feel as if I’ve been in hand-to-hand combat with Mother Nature. Currently, I am covered in poison ivy. I have blisters on my body in places I heretofore did not know existed. The worst spots
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HOSTILE RESTING FACE Photo Courtesy of David Veksler 0:00 / 0:00 Hostile Resting Face Years ago, I worked as the program director of the Injury Prevention Resource and Research Center at Dartmouth Medical School. As part of my job, I lobbied for car seat/seat belt legislation in New Hampshire, a state whose motto is Live
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THE CONCEPT OF SKEEVY Photo Courtesy of Nathan Dumlao 0:00 / 0:00 Skeevy As far as I know, all of my maternal Italian American ancestors survived the pandemic of 1918. My theory is that they beat the Spanish flu because they governed their lives by the hygienic principles of skeevy. The word skeevy is Italian
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LOVE IN THE TIME OF COVID Photo Courtesy of Youseff Naddam 0:00 / 0:00 Love in the Time of Covid On a recent morning, I awoke at five to the sound of our basement door closing two floors below. In order to keep me safer, my husband is now living down there in a little
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WORDS YOU NEVER WANT TO HEAR 0:00 / 0:00 Words You Never Want to Hear A couple of weeks ago, at the end of a cut, my stylist said, “Hmm…your hair looks strange.” A week of high humidity had made me resemble a poodle. Perhaps that’s what she meant. As you might imagine, her statement
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ON THE ADVISABILITY OF SWEARING 0:00 / 0:00 Swearing Recently, after four attempts, a TSA agent failed to collect a non-fuzzy image of my fingerprints. No matter how firmly I pressed and no matter how I positioned my hand, the device would not record my prints crisply. Maybe I should be grateful. My inability to
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LIVING FOREVER 0:00 / 0:00 Living Forever My dad died a few years ago. Even though he needed a pacemaker to regulate his heart and he was a brittle, non-compliant diabetic, his death still shocked us. Often, my father would start a sentence, “If I ever die….”–as if the inevitability of his death was nota foregone
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IF I WAS YOU 0:00 / 0:00 If I Was You In my hip hop class, we dance to a Meghan Trainor song whose lyrics are: “If I was you, I would wanna be me, too. I would wanna be me, too.” People perk up during this song. We’re more likely to strut, rather than
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LOCALLY SOURCED PET TO TABLE DINING 0:00 / 0:00 Pet to Table Dining Growing up, I desperately wanted a pet. We lived in a tenement bordered by an asphalt driveway in the back and a concrete sidewalk in the front. Our apartment was so tiny that we needed only a cook stove to heat the
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