A is for . . . . Short Prose Pieces Centered Around a Single Letter

alone
Alan Bern

In Aina Haina Valley, Honolulu, on one short block, Kimokeo Street, 52 kids! 52! Always a game going in the street. Mostly German dodgeball: the best way to stub toes. Just a little blood, but so bad hurt. That hot day while sister napped, I looked out to the street and saw Ronnie and Lynn — both older than me — kicking the ball around. I rushed out, no shoes, and ticked a big toe on the curb — oh sting! I looked up, embarrassed. “Ronnie!” I yelled. But they were going in. “Lunch,” Lynn called. I looked across the street, no Stephen or Stuart. But there was a ball. I stepped carefully across and kicked it softly. No one to play with. So so quiet. Where was Ivan? Hot day. Then I remembered: my dog! I’d named her ʻeleʻele one (pronounced élay élay óhnay). I called her whole name two times, and she ran over wagging and wagging. We could play dodge ball! Oh, well, maybe not, but what a good good dog.


astronaut                  
Alan Peat

We are sitting in the space where the cookery books were yesterday. Not many of us; thirty at most. When the nervous young man introduces the evening’s speaker he jokes about the poor attendance — calls us “a select group.” No-one laughs. The astronaut doesn’t look up. Last week a Spice Girl was moved to a bigger venue. Twenty-odd of us eagerly wait for the man who walked on the moon to start talking. Then he begins and an hour passes quicker than you can say Saturn 5  — the dangers of being a test pilot in the 1950s; what it was like to enter Tokyo Bay at the end of World War II; a couple of anecdotes about being one of NASA’s Mercury Seven. He doesn’t look like his heart’s in it but, after he’s done talking, I stand in the short queue, waiting my turn with the requisite recently bought hardback autobiography in my hands. And, when I reach him he dutifully signs it and I can’t quite believe that I’m shaking hands with Alan Shepard: the first American in space; commander of Apollo 14; the man who played a golf stroke on the moon.


apple (cider)                                                                    
Antonia Matthew

I went to stay with my uncle and aunt in rural Devonshire. One afternoon my uncle said, “I’m going to get some apple cider. Come along.” It was a long walk along country lanes to a farm.  There was a large open barn; inside were tall round tanks with pipes coming out of them. My uncle gave a whistle. A man appeared, grinning. “Cum for your zider now, 'ave yer, Mr. Bill?”  My uncle nodded. The farmer walked into the barn followed by my uncle.He turned a tap, ran some brown liquid into a mug and handed it to my uncle. My uncle took several swallows, then handed back the mug. “Good cider John, lousy, good and lousy.” Lousy, I thought, doesn't that mean no good? The two jugs were filled, my uncle paid the farmer who slapped him on his back, “cum agin soon, Mr. Bill,” and my uncle nodded. We set back down the lane. Later, I asked my aunt, “why did Uncle Bill call the cider lousy?”  My aunt laughed, “wait till supper.” At supper we lifted our glasses. “Cheers,” they said. I took a drink and the cider hit the back of my throat, so sharp-tasting, that I spluttered and coughed. They both laughed. “That's what cider's meant to do, catch you at the back of the throat, good and sharp. We call that lousy.”


agriculture
Barrie Levine

I am a suburban New Jersey native. My husband grew up on the mean streets of Boston. We married in 1972 and purchased an uninsulated cinderblock house, north of Boston, but we couldn’t resist the magical property, ten acres of meadow bordered by a stand of mature pine and lakefront. Paul quickly took to country life and bought a John Deere farm tractor with attachments. He built stone walls, the borders that make good neighbors in New England. He rototilled the soil and planted vegetables, including an impressive field of cornstalks. He built a coop and our children collected eggs and tended chickens, until the flock was decimated by a wily hawk who left piles of feathers. Paul enrolled in an animal husbandry program at the county extension school. He purchased a pair of Oxfordshire sheep, a handsome breed with dark faces, and they thrived chewing the meadow down to the ground. We delivered the lambs, thanks to my husband’s knowledge of animal breeding and behavior. A hairdresser by trade with his own salon, he bought shearing equipment and we sold the wool. I could never have predicted that, during an idyllic phase of my life, I would become a farmer’s wife.


allergic
Blue Waters

When I was little I used to love all the excitement at our family’s farm near Greensburg, Kansas whenever it was time to mow the hay from the fields, thresh it into piles of grain, and store it in the big silo. All those enormous whirring machines were magical to me. But soon an itchy rash would spread across my face, and my eyes would burn and swell up. When it got so I couldn’t breathe anymore, I would go and hide inside the pick-up truck, roll up the windows, and wheeze into a paper bag.


angel
Carole Johnston

I did see a bright green halo above that little girl’s head. I really did. However, I should not have posted it on Facebook. Immediately, I got a text from my daughter telling me to see a neurologist because it might be an aura signaling an ocular migraine or an impending stroke. So . . . after I endured the horrendous cacophony of a head scan, the neurologist said that my brain was normal, although a snarky friend insisted my brain never had been normal. I started googling auras (the spiritual kind) and angels. What else could I do? A green aura designates the person as a healer. Then, I had a dream about an angel wearing green, standing behind my cousin who was about to undergo a liver transplant. I was spooked. I called my friend, Normandi Ellis, who is an Egyptologist and Spiritualist minister. She confirmed that a dream about an angel wearing green was a good sign for my cousin’s transplant surgery and recovery. The surgery was, indeed, a success, but what about the little girl with the green aura? I saw her again and she appeared to be perfectly average — no halo. So . . . is this girl a healer? Is she an angel? Or did she need healing that day? After three years, I still have not had a stroke nor seen another glowing green aura. Was it delusion or hallucination or just a bright spot on a grey day? It’s a mystery.


artichoke
Deborah Burke Henderson
 
During the height of the sticky, summer months, Dad relished having a big steamed artichoke with dinner. He introduced us four kids to this enjoyment, too. Settled in his armchair at the head of the table, he’d warn us about the spiny tips sprouting from each leaf. Then, he’d carefully pluck a deep olive green outer leaf, dip the wide, ridged edge in a small ramekin of shimmery melted butter, bring the beauty to his lips, and let his tongue savor the blend of flavors as he chewed. After the pile of discarded leaves grew deep in a nearby bowl, he went on to explain how to prepare and eat the choke’s heart. “This is the best part,” he’d exclaim, a gleam in his eyes. Soon, warm droplets dripped down our wrists as we shared butter pots. Grins spread across our faces. Sometimes, young Dud let out a screech whenever a thorny spike pricked his chubby little fingers. Dad introduced us to so many new experiences through food, music, and travel, and inspired each of us to challenge and stretch ourselves. Grateful for that. Grateful for you. Miss you, Dad.


ants
Ellen Orleans

“I’d always imagined I’d live in a modern split-level,” my mother says, wrestling with a stuck kitchen drawer. I am ten and have never lived anywhere else. Drafty rooms in the winter, basement floods in springtime, ants in the kitchen each summer. Just yesterday, my mother swept six carpenter ants into a dust pan, while I tugged open the kitchen door, then deposited them outside. This is not uncommon. “If you wanted a split level, why did you buy this house?”  “Your father wanted to move here.” “What about what you wanted?” “I imagined him on his house calls, driving past the home he wished he’d bought.” I don’t notice she didn’t answer my question. I do know my father stopped making house calls before I was even born. Years later, long after I have moved away, my mother will still sweep ants. But first she will step on them, then drop them into the trash. Too difficult now to balance the dust pan in one hand, open the heavy kitchen door with the other, before shaking them loose — alive — into the grass below.


aura
Emily Rhoads Johnson

I was practicing a Mozart sonata on the piano when suddenly sections of notes on the page disappeared. In their place were large black patches that slid from one spot to another. How fascinating, I thought. How thrilling! Was it some kind of magic? Was I having a vision? (At 14, I was into stories with a supernatural twist: the Brontes, Dickens, Poe.) When I told my mother what was happening, her face fell. She told me I was seeing an aura, a visual disturbance that often precedes a migraine, something she had experienced many times in her life. To her, it was a sign of misfortune — an indicator that my life, like hers, would probably be plagued with excruciating headaches. She was right. Today, decades later, the start of an aura fills me with dread. Oh, how I wish I could still feel that same sense of wonder I felt at 14 — believing that somehow I’d been singled out to experience beautiful, glimmering emanations because I was touched with magic!


awe
Florin C. Ciobica
 
Crack of dawn. Like every day, I go for a walk in the neighborhood with my puppy. Toto doesn't understand what humanity is going through. Suddenly I notice something that terrifies me. A featherless swallow chick lying on the sidewalk. I realize he's fallen out of the nest. I immediately pick it up, wrap it with a napkin and then put it in a small plastic bag. In the distance, the siren of an ambulance can be heard. I bring the dog home and get on my bike. I have to find a proper place to bury the baby bird, not among concrete blocks of flats. I pedal until I am away from the hustle and bustle of the city. I stop at a small park where there are a few fruit trees. I kneel down and dig a small hole under a bitter cherry tree. I place the baby bird into the hole, muttering a short prayer. The breeze covers him with a few petals. I burst into tears. Nobody observes me.


abject
Joan Leotta

Perhaps a word of disheartenment seems odd for a birthday word. But I am writing it on this day to loosen its ties on my mind and heart, to expel it from my being. “Be Not Afraid” is the message of the angels — and so we walk ahead into whatever life has spread along our path, looking forward, without fear, and with confidence, even if it is only of the shaky variety. If abject takes over, I will be dropped to my knees, unable to progress. If I become an abject-controlled person then I will be walking without the light of hope to guide me. Right now, as I wait for my daughter’s surgery date and see her growing weaker, the light on my path feels dimmer, as if the wind has blown down the power lines. I sense abject circling, but remind myself that even abject cannot sever the tie between me and my faith. I know that the light is still there.


answers
Kathleen Kramer

The Baltimore Catechism — it had a dark blue cover, worn soft from much use. It resided next to the Douay Bible on top of the piano. Every Saturday evening, Mother would take it down, sit in the rocking chair with the needlepoint seat and call me for our weekly lesson. So while Grandma clattered the supper dishes in the sink, Mother quizzed me on the Catechism. Full of questions, full of answers. I got most of them right and loved the approval on Mother’s face. Maybe that’s why, in school, third row, 4th seat from the front, I would wave my hand wildly, eager to give the answer, the right answer, and see that look of approval. Some of the other kids undoubtedly hated me. And I don’t blame them. But now I’ve come, instead, to love the questions, the ones without an answer. Scientists are discovering how things happen, when they happened. The Big Bang. Giant tube worms, squirming a mile deep in the sea. Us. Me. But do they know why? There could have been nothing. But here we are. Seeking for that why is reason enough to keep going.


artist
Katrina Morse
 
From the earliest age I was Observer. Before I was 2 years old I remember looking under my great-grandmother’s kitchen table in Kansas, my head just under the tabletop when I was standing. I saw a big gallon glass jug in the corner. My mom told me it was root beer, getting bubbly the old-fashioned way with yeast and sugar. As I grew and my brothers and sister were born, I was Big Sister, telling my younger siblings not to swear and to feed the cats. Then I learned the miracle of sewing and made stuffed animals and my own bell-bottoms. I was Seamstress at age 8. When I was 12 I had the false title of Tennis Pro when I won a neighborhood tournament, being the oldest contestant. I got to go to the Tennis US Open for that. That was also the age that I was Strongest and Fastest, being the tallest child, boy or girl, in 6th grade. In Junior High and High School I was Scientist, studying nature and loving the periodic table. But I also became Artist — a creative thinker and maker of things and happenings. Now I realize I’ve been an artist all along.


aglow
Margaret Walker
 
When I was growing up it seemed every house had a piano and long before we started piano lessons we learned to pound out two songs on the piano. The first was Chopsticks followed soon by a one-finger version of Heart and Soul. “Graduating” to playing Heart and Soul with both hands and then as a duet was a major accomplishment — and one to be repeated as loudly as possible when having new guests for whom to display this prodigious talent — sometimes including our own flourishes that we were certain added magnificently to the arrangement. At some point, my friends and I discovered the sheet music and lyrics and were able to add to the cacophony by singing at the top of our lungs to our own accompaniment. It was some years before I fully appreciated the lyrics — “…that little kiss you stole held all my heart and soul.”


a-line
Peaches Gillette

1965. I run through the tall summer-green grass in Prospect Park, in search of a place to hide — my brother is the seeker. I stay close to my mother who sits on a bench smiling and looking toward the sky. She is my sun, in all I am, in all I do, in all I feel; she is the center of the universe. Her yellow A-line dress curtains around her, and sweetly rests upon the top of the grass, grounding her to the earth. Her glow pulls me in. I tuck away under the bench where she sits. Her dress conceals me, her motherness protects me, my brother cannot find me. Her A-line dress becomes a place in which I drift away. I am at peace.


allowance
Pris Campbell

When I entered eighth grade in the fifties, grown up enough to wish for lipstick and perfume, my father began giving me 25 cents a day during the week as my allowance. It was his intention to teach me how to save money for special things, in advance of the time when I would have to budget for rent, clothes, and food. Lipstick was still a no-no and cheap toilet water was barely within reach, much less perfume, so I saved for daily sodas and cheese crackers at Kohlers drug store, a weekly barbecue sandwich at Press’s Grill, and occasional drive-in movies across the state line in Monroe — often with a couple of friends stashed in the trunk to make our money stretch far enough for popcorn and soda for each of us. My parents relented and bought me a bottle of perfume for Christmas when I was 15. The bottle was white with large marble-like bubbles across its surface. It was shaped like it held a genie, with a beautiful ceramic stopper and a cork plug. The bottle could be upended, saturating the cork, which was then used to dab faint aromas behind my ears and on my wrists. Not for school days, my parents admonished. But it was allowed for the occasional dances at the community center or square dances at the edge of town. I still have that bottle. I’ve kept it sealed up for all these years but the few times I’ve opened it there was still the slight hint of perfume lingering on the cork. As if a genie truly inhabited the bottle, each sniff brings back my parents’ faces, my South Carolina home, and friends who are now long gone — as well as those secret hopes I had that a boy might be so entranced by my scent that he would kiss me.


alice
Theresa A. Cancro

"A my name is Alice" was one of the jump rope rhymes I learned on the school playground. And Alice happens to be my middle name. When I was growing up, it was considered old-fashioned. In first and second grade, I was proud of it, but later I was reluctant to tell anyone who happened to ask. Over the years, I learned about Aunt Alice, an older sister of my great-grandmother. She was very much ahead of her time: a free spirit who outlived two husbands and divorced another, moved to California, and bragged about her family heritage to anyone who would listen, including claiming to be distantly related to General Lafayette. During the roaring twenties when she dared to wear short skirts, she talked my great-grandmother into cutting her long hair. As an adult, I've grown to like my middle name, and even though I never knew her, I feel a kinship with Aunt Alice, especially when I strike out on a new, unusual project.


acres
Tina Wright

When I was a kid 20 acres was a big field and it took forever for my dad to plow even 10 acres with the John Deere A tractor and a 2-bottom plow with no hydraulics. As a farmhand years later, I was expected to polish off such a field pretty damn quick with 100 horsepower (or more) tractors, 4- or 5-bottom plows. Way back in the day, you felt every rock on the old John Deere that Dad was bouncing on . . . at the same time a farmer across our little valley was plowing with horses! I only saw Joe Cashun and his horse team from far away, never close up.  


ants
Zee Zahava

My mother used to buy her magazines at the check-out aisle in the supermarket: Family Circle, Woman’s Day, Redbook. She read them at night, in bed, to help her fall asleep. She carefully studied the recipes — every cup and every teaspoon — until her eyes closed. She tried hard to replicate these recipes: cheese and bean casseroles topped with marshmallows; cornflakes smashed to bits and mixed into meatloaf; tuna and Jell-O pie. The magazines also gave Mom ideas for “healthy snacks” to serve in the afternoon, in case anyone wanted a “pick me up.” I never did, but that didn’t stop her. One time, and only one time, it was ants on a log. My mother took celery stalks, stuffed Skippy peanut butter into the crevices, and placed plump raisins down the “log.” She presented this with a ta-da flourish. I said No. I said it loudly and I said it forcefully. Some foot-stamping might have been involved. What was she thinking? Ants? Ants??!!?? The only thing worse than celery is celery with ants. Even if those ants were really perfectly harmless raisins. It was still unthinkable.

F is for . . . .

fennel
Alan Bern
 
You didn’t believe me when I said that “I was bored . . . in my childhood.” “Fiddle-faddle,” you stomped a foot, “no way!” I explained: “When I was seven, I’d wait in front of my house for my best friend Jim to let me know when he’d be coming down so we could play with toy soldiers. Jim and I called it playing with men. Awfully 1950s, no? Jim mostly didn’t let me know when he was coming down since he was always so slow doing his chores. Like folding his clean clothes and putting them away. Well-organized dresser drawers. Jim’s mother required them. Even back then I thought, “Good luck to her.” It was so dry in the hellstrip dirt out in front of our house where the fennel grew wild. It wasn’t that hot, but it never rained in the summertime at all. Didn’t the fennel need water to grow? Maybe not much. Then I told you about the host plant fennel (Foeniculum vulgare) where swallowtail butterflies come to lay their eggs and swallowtail caterpillars feed. Then you wanted to kiss; and you knew I did, too. Lace in my fingers, and into my palms — the scent.


feathers
Alan Peat

Whenever I go for a walk, I can’t resist picking up feathers. They seem too beautiful to be tramped into the dirt, so I fill my pockets with them. I’ve been at it for so long now that distinguishing their origin is usually a relatively simple matter. I mainly find crow and pigeon and magpie feathers but occasionally something catches me off guard. A bright green feather in Kew Gardens foiled me.Turns out that escaped parakeets have bred there for ages: problem solved! One day my pockets were so full of feathers that I stuck one into a knitted monkey I owned. Goodness knows why I had a knitted monkey! Goodness knows why I stuck a feather into him! But then I stuck in another. And another. And now this monkey, who I call “Feathers” (of course) sits on my dashboard, a feathery porcupine, all hint of his simian origins hidden. My pockets are still filling up with feathers. So, dear reader, if you happen to have a knitted monkey lying around, unwanted and unloved, please do feel free to contact me. I have a good home for him by the steering wheel.


family
Ann Carter

family is baggage is wind is complex fortune is a backwards step is happiness is confusion is dull and delightful is the answer is the question is salt air is found objects is soft steps and jumping jacks is long deep breaths is hiccups is misfortune is a hot cup of tea is the bottom of the compost bin is a tickle instead of a tear is a favorite pet is the pet’s untimely death is a favorite cousin is sunburn and windburn and what it feels like when the wind stops is green grass and fresh snowfall is having your hair pulled is having your hair brushed is a knot that can’t be undone is a cat sitting on your lap and a dog chasing its tail is long conversations and short hellos and whispers and a broken dish and the dish glued back together is a ringing telephone is a three point shot is a pansy in bloom in February is no holes in your socks and freshly made bread and not being interrupted and forgiveness.


fired
Barrie Levine

After freshman year in college, I landed a summer job at the Woolworth’s lunch counter. I learned how to make malts, sodas, sundaes, and banana splits. One of my regulars, an older man who ordered apple pie with coffee daily, always left a quarter tip under the saucer. Another girl was soon hired full-time for the busy counter. One afternoon, she prepared a strawberry malt and I saw her insert the canister into the spinner — but not far enough. It rocketed through the air and skidded on the floor, but not before ejecting its contents all over, including on my yellow uniform. My boss walked up to me and shouted, “Miss Weiner, did you do that?” I tried to explain but he didn’t believe me. The bright pink dripping off my uniform convinced him of my guilt. The new girl just watched. He ordered me to return my uniform and leave. My public humiliation at the counter burned for weeks. In September, I returned to school, armed with a tougher shell and more prepared for “the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.” Still, I wondered if the apple pie guy cared enough to ask why I’d gone missing.


flatulence
Blue Waters

I’m not sure how old I was when I first heard the word flatulence. Maybe 8 or 9. I knew it to be a polite way of saying farts, so that was something to ponder. I enjoyed the fine art of creative farting. A solitary artform, for the most part, and the best place to go to practice it was high up in a cottonwood tree on a windy day. I would have extra beans for lunch and wait for my gut to gather up some powerful gasses. Then straddling a branch in various grandiose poses, I could force out some impossible combos of sweet little squeaks, quick pops, low rumbles, or hideously long blaaaaats. My posse of squirrels and crows would gather around me to enjoy the performance. And any living thing on the ground below would look up with big eyes to locate the source of all this raucous flatulence. Me!!


freedom
Carole Johnston

This is a meditation on the freedom to be lost. I want to be “cloud-hidden, whereabouts unknown” on a mountaintop. I imagine rambling down the mountain, meandering here and there in a marigold yellow caravan, a green lantern in the window. I want to be a hawk streaking across dawn in a turquoise boat, into azure seas. I remember camping out on a red dirt mesa in Monument Valley, below a myriad of stars. Alone. No destination. Once I drove solo through mountains and desert, camping beneath stars and pine trees, free to linger here and there, no commitments, responsible to no one. Once I danced on a windy hill in Norwich, making magic with the Hawthorn Queen (the poet Joy McCall) in the power of a fairy ring. Now . . .  freedom is a memory that lights up my brain like a poem of the open road.


flames
Christina Martin

Eyes glazed, not really seeing. That's what happens when I stare too long at the flames in the fireplace, floating into another world, a world of safety and comfort, Christmas and birthdays and parties crackling with noise. The Swiss cottage we all used to stay at. And of course, snow. There has to be snow doesn't there — that's the best part! My snow castle is the tallest. It melts as my granddaughter walks through the door pulling off her hat. “Nana!”


friendship
Deborah Burke Henderson
 
The years have passed by, 58 to be exact, and her love continues to surround me, fill me, comfort me. We were 13 when we met, both navigating the white waters of adolescence. Over time, we have seen one another through the ebb and flow of each struggle, joy, and sorrow. Like bits of sea glass, treasures to be found in the tangle of black-green seaweed, our journeys have honed us. We have lost any sharp edges, polished by the turn of each wave, but still we sparkle in the dazzling noon light. Our connection is deep-rooted and ever constant. Our souls sing melodiously. Our friendship is a gift never to be taken away.


father
Ellen Orleans

The doctors say it’s a matter of weeks. I’m in the car with my father, driving away from the hospital. What I want him to say is This doesn’t seem possible. This can’t be real. How will I live without her? Instead he says, “I know how to use the dishwasher. I know how to use the microwave oven. I know how to use the washer and the dryer. I guess I’ll be okay.” If I were a different daughter, if he were a different father, perhaps I would not be stunned into silence. I’d forgive him for thinking of himself first. I’d remember he’s never lived alone. I’d feel pity. I am not that daughter. Four months later, I will listen to widowers speak of their wives: She was my best friend. She made me a better man. I’m an ex-Marine who fought at Iwo Jima, but living without her is the hardest thing I’ve ever done. These men are not my father.


forget
Jack Goldman

“Forget about it!” was my father’s way of telling me that, no, I couldn’t have that pair of rugged boots displayed in the window of our local shoe store. An especially emphatic “I said, forget about it!” was what followed if I continued to nag him. Once his verdict was rendered, it was final — basta! finito! end of discussion. Argument was useless. He never changed his mind. You almost had to admire his unshakeable judgment. But as I grew older, I came to question his injunction. How was I to forget something just because he told me to? Sure, I had to accept his refusal to buy me something I wanted or give me permission to, say, go Christmas caroling with some of my Christian friends. But, in the end, though I’m sure he didn’t realize it, I disobeyed him. “Forget about it?” I never did.


fennel
Jim Mazza

If I were to write in praise of my favorite flavor, it undoubtedly would be an ode to fennel or, as I prefer to think of it in Italian, the playfully-named, finocchio. Contemplating the flavors I love most — lemon, basil, and cinnamon come to mind. Yet, fennel, with its soft similarity to licorice, ranks on top. Fennel is an herb, which grows tall from a bulbous base, and is often thought of as a vegetable. And I say, yes, herb AND vegetable! Either way, given my severe case of finocchio fever, I can’t get enough of its enticing aroma and flavor. Years ago, we rented an ancient stone cottage in Liguria. When we arrived, we made our way through a steel gate opening onto a sizeable garden situated in front of the tiny, shuttered dwelling. The garden was comprised of hundreds of 4- and 5-foot-tall fennel plants — a dense, feathery forest of greens and whites and flowering yellows. Realizing we had arrived at a place that, for me, verged on the spiritual, I immediately dropped my luggage and leaned forward, burying my face among the feathery fronds. In my revery, I heard an unmistakable whispering: “Benvenuto … Welcome!”


first
Joan Leotta

Looking for part-time work, I stumbled upon a call for docents at Mount Vernon, home and resting place of George Washington, our first elected President. Soon, I was posted in rotation at various places on the Estate — the house, the garden, the tomb, etc. — to tell visitors that part of GW’s story. A reenactment was planned for December 14, 1999, the two hundredth anniversary of GW’s death. Docents vied for assignments that would let them watch most of the cortege. No one wanted to be the docent who would have to miss out, but someone had to remain in docent HQ. I also wanted to be a part of the event, but as newest docent, considering fairness, I offered myself to our supervisor as the person to stay behind. She was puzzled. I explained I felt as last hired, I should not take a coveted position from others. Two days later, “funeral” duties were posted. The HQ docent job was divided. No one would miss more than an hour of the festivities. Except me. My assignment? To accompany Mount Vernon’s press person all day. I got to see the entire reenactment. My offer to stay behind put me first. Last-hired, first to see all.


falling
Julie Lind

“Maybe we’ll see some seagulls at the Falls,” I said as I pulled out of the driveway. “I hate birds,” Nanny said. I nodded and turned onto Pine Avenue. The neighborhood changed when we passed the Middle School and entered downtown Niagara Falls. Houses were now hidden behind dilapidated factories. Smoke stacks emitted puffs of stale gray air that refused to be absorbed into the humidity. Behind them, I could make out the rapids of the Niagara River. I followed the signs to Goat Island. The grass became greener, the factories now in our wake. As we entered the park, I could see the mist of the Falls. I found a parking spot and helped Nanny out of the car. “Isn’t it nice?” she whispered, leading us to the mist. Though she was not even half a foot away from me, I could barely make out her words. Her voice was calmer than I had heard it since my aunt’s death. “So nice,” she repeated. She didn’t wait for me to respond. Her voice kept going. “Doesn’t it make me want to . . .  Doesn’t it? Doesn’t it make you want to fall in?”


forever
Kath Abela Wilson

fallen hero it is my father i am thinking of I have not written enough about him he was my forever passion to write he was a poet the first in my heart and i was first in his i always knew that and i was first of five children i  kept my place as he did in the forever heart of  the world but he forgot that forever lasts forever and he fell out of love he who created love and  forever in the first place every little bit of it his was the long long story and when he forgot that first was forever and left the whole of it and disappeared and i found he found another I called and said you have gone against everything you taught me about forever he started a new forever and a new first she left her own forever for him in the end became my friend because we shared that forever she told me after his long long silence in the end he fell down the front stairs away from her and she still loved him too


flowers
Kathleen Kramer       

Dad never bought flowers for Mother. Unless you count the spray of roses we bought in his name for her coffin. He couldn’t go to her funeral. He had had too much of death and his 75-year love for our mother didn’t need his presence to confirm what we all knew to be true — she was the center of his life and would remain so, regardless of whether she was alive or not. More than once after she died I overheard him reliving some memory with her in his quiet, raspy voice. And although Dad never bought flowers for Mother, he brought her flowers — often. Honeysuckle, pink and wild. Lilacs, purple and white, drooping with their perfume. Apple blossoms from the crab apple tree in the backyard and from gnarled, abandoned orchards behind old barns. We were always glad to see the flowers drinking their fill from a mason jar placed squarely in the middle of the blue-topped dinette table in the kitchen. Their fragrance filled our house. And our mother, breathing it in, knew, in spite of  her failing sight, that Dad loved her.


fuel
Lou Robinson
 
Food for the animals. Hay stacked to the ceiling; dry and frozen dog food stored. Heater in the water tank. Bag of carrots. Am I spoiled? Yes but. So many signs of early deprivation all around me. Mostly lack of love, or abundance of cruelty, and I can’t feed them all. I want the barn full but I don’t want to feel full. When we canoed to the farmer’s market we’d canoe back with baskets full of healthy vegetables. The return was hard paddling, upstream, startling nesting egrets along the shore into flight. Keep everything moving. Anxiety is fear of stasis. Everything, even water, runs to stay alive, or at least until death catches up.


funnies
Margaret Dennis

My Aunt Ki always read us the funny papers on Sunday. It was a ritual. After 9 o’clock Mass, she would walk my little brother Johnny and me to Fred’s News Store, just around the corner from our house. Fred’s store had everything, but what we liked best were the racks of comic books. Ki had rules: we could each pick two, but there was to be no romance for me and no war themes for Johnny. Ki picked up the bulky Sunday paper and waited patiently for us to make our choices. When at last we were ready, we went up to the counter to pay Fred. He was always the one behind the cash register. Fred had a very mean look and only one “regular” hand. His left hand wore a brown glove and it remained still, down along his side. We kids were fascinated by that and tried not to look, but we looked, every time. Once the transaction was complete, we would leave and head for our house. There we would settle on the couch, with Aunt Ki sitting between Johnny and me. Then she would read aloud the “funnies.” There was Sluggo and Nancy, Terry and the Pirates, and my favorite, Brenda Starr. Sunday was the best day of the week.


fascinated
Margaret Walker
 
A tiny white-haired lady with a cane boarded the Metro. Seated near the door I motioned to her to sit beside me and greeted her in my execrable French. Hearing me speak a few words to my husband she asked if I was American. “Oui, madame.” She told me she loved Americans but had not talked with one in many years. She had learned some English from American soldiers who liberated her village outside Paris during WWII and proudly recited the English words she remembered — a total of about 20. At our Metro stop I was so engrossed in this conversation that we rode on as she told me, with gestures when I didn’t understand, about living in France during WWII and the glory of the liberation of Paris. Tears filled her eyes — and mine. At her stop, she thanked me (as if I had personally liberated France), took my right hand in both of hers, and kissed me on the cheek. Lifetime souvenirs — the stories of one-time strangers.


fame
Pris Campbell

I’m at a posh Menninger’s Foundation party at APA (the American Psychological Association) in Washington, D.C, and I’m talking to Claude Brown, famed author of the top-selling Manchild In The Promised Land. The book describes his experiences growing up Black in a time when water fountains and bathrooms still said “whites only,” and his years of trouble with the law during and after. I was invited to the party because I worked as an extern at Menninger’s one summer, during grad school, and Claude was invited by an older female psychiatrist from Menniger’s, his “sort of” date. She eyes us now possessively from across the room. Even though we’re not nearly through with what has become an intense conversation, her attention is wearing us down, so he asks me to spend the next day with him. He plans to briefly see two old protest buddies from college days and then look around Washington again. I go along, and we have a great time before parting at the end of the day. We live too far apart to plan future visits. More than a decade passes and I read a syndicated column written by him. In it he talks about his Black friends calling him “marshmallow” because he has White friends, doesn’t speak jive, and likes classical music. Every time he feels he has become just one of the group with his White friends, someone says “and what is the Black point of view on that?” and he’s reminded that, despite all, his skin color still separates him from them. I write him a note of encouragement and send it through the paper but I don’t know if he gets it, or if he even remembers me all these years later. The next time I look him up I discover that he died in his early sixties. In my mind I rerun that day we spent together in Washington, so long ago, and wish that things would have changed in this country by now.


fairies
Theresa A. Cancro

I have always been fascinated by fairies. I guess it started with the poems my mom wrote to accompany her detailed color pencil drawings. I remember "Moon Fairies": "I know moon fairies dwell within the woodland/ Among tangled honeysuckle brambles and wild rose briar . . ." In the first grade, my teacher assigned groups of three or four kids short skits based on poems and songs she came across. That spring, on a small school stage, my two classmates and I — all of us normally very quiet and shy — sang, danced, and skipped to "Ring-a-ring o' Fairies/ Pixies, sprites and elves/ Dancing with a little child/ As nimble as themselves . . ." It was as if Mrs. Lutz knew of my fondness for these mythical beings. Later, when I was a bit older, I imagined tiny humans with butterfly and moth wings flitting among lily-of-the-valley and pink weeping cherry blossoms in our small garden. On my nightstand now is a fairy figurine, complete with stained-glass wings.


forecast
Tina Wright

I love weather and thinking about it. Farmers have always been obsessed with meteorology, way before the Weather Channel and even before the Old Farmers’ Almanac, from which I still remember the winter warning, “When the days begin to lengthen, the cold begins to strengthen.” Making hay in summer takes a lot of forecasting. You mow hay when expecting a few days of good weather and the next day waiting for a heavy dew to burn off the rows of cut hay before you can rake and bale the hay up. A nice sunny day with very little dew and a farmer thinks, “It’s going to rain later.” Because of the lack of dew. There is counterintuitive forecasting on these kinds of days, it can be hot and really humid, you wouldn’t think hay would dry but before a new front of rain, hay dries really fast in the humid air. And you are racing to beat the rain. The Spectrum News weather report on TV is called a Futurecast, what an irritating made-up word! For gosh sake, guessing whatever weather spell the goddesses are sending our way, that’s a forecast.


forgetting
Tom Clausen

So much to forget. Yes, I did get an “F” on several tests and exams through high school and college. But amazingly to me, my parents, and my friends at the time, my serious struggles to not get an “F” were just enough to avoid getting one as my final grade. The label of “failing” was often a close call but not what defined me! For the record, I did get 12 credit hours of D-minus in my junior year of college and a letter was sent to my parents, explaining my poor performance and saying that if repeated in the next semester it would result in suspension and a need to withdraw from future studies. It was a scare enough to get me to do better and I began (to try) to forget that I had done so poorly. Here, fifty years later, I have mostly forgotten all my earlier trials and tribulations but of course those failings still reside in some place, like all failings that we try to forget but never totally can . . . until everything, even the best memories, are forgotten. 


fish
Zee Zahava

Betty and Jay are our neighbors who live in the apartment next door to us on Vyse Avenue. Sometimes I go there so Betty can watch me if Mom needs a break. They have a daughter named Susan who is always in her crib, sleeping. She is a boring baby. Jay is a skinny man who blinks a lot and he talks very fast. He keeps big fish in a small fish tank. I don’t like him. Betty wears her hair in a pony tail the same way I do, which is funny because I’m just a girl but she is a grown-up woman. One day when I’m sitting on their living room rug, watching the fish go back and forth, I figure out how to tie my own shoelaces. When Mom comes to pick me up I run to the door to show her what I’ve done. But Betty gets there first and tells Mom that she taught me how to make the bows. She lied! She was in the bedroom with boring Susan the whole time. I don’t say a word because Betty seems so happy. She’s bouncing up and down and that makes her pony tale swoosh back and forth. But a few months later Betty and Jay and Susan move away. Betty is crying, the day they leave. My mother doesn’t cry and neither do I. An old lady moves in next door to us. We don’t even know her name and she never invites us into her apartment. I don’t know for absolute certain but I have a pretty strong feeling that she doesn’t own any fish.

G is for . . .

gone
Alan Bern
 
I was counting back one day. The numbers disappeared. I stopped. Cold. Started again. They still left. John was showing me his dance moves. They left too. We knew we were hungry so we chose the left turn back into town. Walking. For sandwiches. Tuna. They’d disappear too. Soon enough. Uncle George was sure I’d remembered wrong where the little blind alleys lay in my wonderful walk years ago. “Across the pond, yes, and you took a right turn.” Now I remembered: no, it was a left. And the walk along was long. But so worth it. Though not at all retraceable. Really finished. We stuffed the sandwich wrappers in our jacket pockets. Wadded up.


gran
Alan Peat

Grandad is in the living room. He’s wearing his white shirt and a burgundy tie. I’m sitting in the kitchen with Gran, when, quite suddenly, she takes my hand and leads me through. He is lying in an open coffin. “It’s the last time we’ll be together and I want him to know,” she begins. I well up immediately. “I want him to know that we jumped the gun, but we proved them all wrong.”
She is shaking her head and now we’re both crying. I’ve worked out what she means and can’t believe it’s never crossed my mind before. I know gran is seventeen years older than my mother but it’s just a fact; like knowing she was born the year the Titanic sank. Nothing more or less than that…. Some time later, I learn that when her father discovered she was pregnant he beat her so hard that the neighbours heard it through the walls. But still she washed his clothes and cleaned his house and cooked for her stepbrothers. And after my grandfather’s death she laid his clothes out neatly on the bedside chair each evening, just as she’d done for sixty three years.


girl (scouts)
Ann Carter

It was when she went away to Camp Shirley Rogers that my sister learned to be away from Mama and Daddy and our brother and sisters. She didn’t like it really at all, and got very homesick. Probably the only thing worse than the homesickness was trying to pass her deep water swim test. She failed it, which only made her want to excel at cooking. And I can tell you she used to make the very best chocolate pound cake and buttermilk biscuits. Johnny Sue Sassenfield is the only girl my sister remembers from Camp Shirley Rogers. She was also from Winston-Salem, but didn’t go to the same school as my sister. After those few weeks my sister never saw Johnny Sue again. The other day we found a little cardboard box that contained my sister’s scout pins and membership cards, along with her flying up wings that were sewn on her badge sash. On the sleeve of her scout uniform, which is also in that little box, are the other badges she earned: camp crafts, plant kingdom (trees and shrubs), model citizen, traveler, let’s go cooking, pioneer, books, my country, and a few more that she can’t quite remember. In weekly Girl Scout meetings my sister solemnly pledged to do her duty to God and country, and to obey the Girl Scout laws, and she can still recite that pledge. But the part she remembers the most are the sour bubblegum balls that burst in her mouth in surprise and delight.


groceries
Antonia Matthew

Who could have ever imagined that getting groceries would become so fraught with danger and that the supermarket would become a place to be negotiated with fear and trembling. Regulations: Hours between 6 and 8 a.m. for high risk shoppers only. Masks  compulsory. Keep a social distance of 6 feet between yourself and other shoppers. Follow the directional arrows. Travel the aisles, looking straight ahead. Ignore the person breaking the rules. The security guard will strong-arm them out the door, as they spit and curse. Forgot an item? Travel the circuit again. Approach the cleaning aisle with care, hoping not to find anyone hiding bottles of hand sanitizer about their person while two others, nearby, wrestle over the last pack of toilet paper. Wait in the checkout line with feet firmly on the STAND HERE square.


girlfriends
Barrie Levine

We met a couple in birthing class 35 years ago, the start of a friendship that ended, so sadly, when they recently died within a year of each other. Our daughters, born ten days apart, claimed that they talked to each other by telephone from their mothers’ stomachs. When they were eight or nine, they re-named each other Frank and Charlee. They wrote scripts for plays with these characters who were themselves. They started a “company” to end pollution and mailed out newsletters in their handwriting. And probably more that we did not know about. They carried on with their self-made world every weekend into their early teens, and then just as suddenly as it appeared, it disappeared. Even now, both married and leading responsible lives with little girls of their own, they will occasionally call each other by those special names. I notice the recognition in their eyes of the young girls deep inside, a treasure of their friendship. At the first funeral, of the dad, they hugged and cried together — all four parents were really parents of them both. At the second funeral, I lent my shoulder for them to cry on, now mother to two daughters.


gibbous
Blue Waters

My father and I were driving along a dirt road on our way back home from our farm to the small town where we lived. He probably wanted to check on something and I jumped at the chance to ride with him in his pick-up truck. It was so much better than a car. We sat quietly and watched the moon rise above the flat Kansas horizon. It was huge and orange. I asked if the moon could still be called full even if one side of it was a bit fuzzy and didn’t form a perfect circle in the sky. He thought about that for a long time and then told me there’s a name that describes an almost full moon but he couldn’t remember what it was. This remained a mystery to me until, decades later, I heard someone describe “the gibbous moon” in a very dramatic way, in a conversation I overheard at a restaurant. Later, I started asking everyone I knew if they had any idea what a gibbous moon looked like. Some did, most didn’t. I looked “gibbous” up in a dictionary and it made sense that it was probably the word my daddy was trying to remember, all those many years ago.


grief
Carole Johnston

I heard a scream the night she died, just after midnight. It woke me from a dream. The phone rang. They told me she was gone and I was a thousand miles away. Years later, I visited her grave, all tangled and overwhelmed by weeds, as if her own children had forgotten her. I brought a trowel, and buried a silver angel charm beside the stone. No one knows. I’m sure it’s still there and will be there as the Earth spins through eons and millennia. The poems she read to childhood-me will last as long. Sometimes I smell tobacco smoke, when there is none, and I feel her presence. She smoked too much and died too young. Grief never leaves us, but we fill the empty space with creativity and poems.


guts
Ellen Orleans

Tug of the tail. Crack of the shell. The colander of raw shrimp sits between my mother and me. I shake my fingers, willing away sticky, dangling feet. We keep peeling. It is June. I am twelve. I remember the cool, clean pages of a hard-bound journal. Sharp knife over shrimp back. “De-veining,” my mother explains. “The vein is really the digestive tract.” She sees my body tighten. “I’ll do that part.” But it’s only fair I do my share. The first two I butcher, but then get better, flesh splitting evenly. I reach for another but it’s the journal I see. My mother’s Marriage Encounter journal. None of my business. I had opened it anyway. She and my father in Montreal.  It is early spring here. As we stepped out of the hotel this morning, I felt like a new bride. Fingers thick with viscera, I remember the journal’s blank pages. “Do you still go to Marriage Encounter?” “Your father didn’t like it.” “Can’t you go by yourself?”  “Marriage Encounter is for couples.” I add my half-peeled shrimp to the pile. My mother carries the bowl to the sink. Cold water, full force, she begins to rinse.


gefilte fish
Jack Goldman

The year my grandfather decided I was old enough to sit at the Passover table, I nodded off during his interminable recitation. When I woke up, I took a nibble of the gefilte fish on my plate. It was my good fortune that my Uncle Eddie, who was on a holiday leave from the Army Medical Corps, was at the table as I began to choke on a small bone that had eluded my grandmother’s radar. There was a general tumult as I gasped for breath. “Drink some water!” “Swallow some matzos!” Uncle Eddie fought his way through the crowd of my well-meaning executioners, some of whom were poking their fingers down my throat while others were slapping me on the back. Eddie picked me up and deftly performed the Heimlich maneuver. The fishbone popped out onto the table to cries of “Gott sei dank!” Then, like a Torah procession, a group of men in yarmulkes and prayer shawls carried me off to bed. Dai-dai-yenu,
Dai-dai-yenu, Dai-dai-yenu, Daiyenu daiyenu! I never got a chance to thank Uncle Eddie, who was killed trying to assist a wounded infantryman during the Battle of the Bulge.


garbage
Jim Mazza
 
The barrel-vaulted glass ceiling of the Milano Centrale train station was ablaze in the afternoon sun. Making ourselves comfortable at the window seats of our train, we soon would be bound for the Ligurian coast. Yet, we were surprised when the compartment door abruptly opened and we found ourselves staring at a well-dressed Italian businessman clutching a bag of McDonald’s takeout. Seeing us, he immediately stepped back into the passageway. We motioned for him to join us inside, but he refused, saying through the half-opened door that he could not eat such spazzatura — garbage — in front of others. “Non è un problema … we’re Americans,” we said smiling. He did not budge until hamburger and fries were consumed and the bag cast aside. Now more relaxed, he entered the cabin, sat down, and immediately launched into stories of his beloved Genova: the architecture, art, and culture. He was most enthusiastic, however, describing the food — the most elegant pasta, richest pesto, sweetest tomatoes. He was disappointed to learn we were not stopping overnight in his hometown. “How could you not stay for a meal or two…?”  We chuckled. For as we listened, we simply could not put those golden arches out of our minds.


giddy
Joan Leotta
 
Growing up, compliments were distributed often in our family. My mom often told me I was smart, loved, precious. But praise for looks, something I craved as a child, was always conditional. Mom would say, “You’d be pretty if you . . . . You could be prettier if you . . . .” However, when she talked about my younger cousin — no hedging. She was the pretty one. My reaction? After a brief flirtation with eye-shadow colors as a teen, I rejected all makeup. I came to terms with being okay looking but not the prettiest. Years later, when my now husband and I were dating, he often told me I was pretty, beautiful even. I’d reply, “You should see my cousin. She’s the really pretty one.” After he met my cousin, Joe told me, “I don’t know what you’re thinking. Your cousin is nice looking, but you are the prettiest.” I began to laugh. I felt a weight lift from my spirit. I was and am pretty — the prettiest, even — to the one whose opinion on that matters most. He still thinks I’m pretty and smart, and I still feel positively giddy when he tells me so.


grampian
Kathleen Kramer

Google the word “Grampian” and you’ll learn it is one of three major mountain ranges in the Scottish Highlands. If you search further, you might find that it is also a tiny town in Pennsylvania, population 321. It’s the tiny town where my parents met at the Grange Hall — a square dance, my dad said. And the band was the famous Bud Moore & the Hillsdale Hillbillies! Dad danced with my mother the whole evening long. Grampian is also where I was born, and my grandparents lived just 7 miles away on a little rented farm, the “Johnson place.” Grampian is where I had my first “permanent wave,” with huge electric curlers so heavy I couldn’t hold my head up. It’s also where, when 4 years old, I strolled up the front steps to our house, vigorously chewing gum. (In those days, a 4-year-old could walk, without fear, to and from a playmate’s house a few doors away.) When my mother asked where I got the chewing gum, I said, “Lia-tia gave it to me.” The next question: “Was it wrapped in paper?” “No, Lia took it out of her mouth.” I got a little spank for that. But it was worth it. Who can resist Wrigley’s Spearmint, even if it’s “ABC”? (ABC = Already Been Chewed!)
 

graveyard
Lou Robinson
 
I sat up in bed, thinking “lost paper bag!” and remembered what spooked him, Tyson, the big warmblood, leaping in the air at the far end of the pasture because a paper bag had blown into the fence and hung there, struggling to get loose. I lost my black leather jacket. The one where the arms hung down past my hands. When next I saw my father, I remembered it was his, the one he wore when riding his Harley. I apologized for losing it and he said, “I still have mine. You got that one at a garage sale.” She says, “I still wear the rubber boots I wore twenty years ago when we went to Scotland!” And there they are, on her feet in the wet grass of the graveyard up the road where all graves bear names of my relatives, but how can they when I’m from far away down south, and so were they. Wait, their relatives were from Scotland, Ireland, and Wales! And now thanks to Helen’s boots, we are all connected!


gab
Margaret Dennis

“Gab” is a word that is probably outdated. To my mind, it meant to talk a lot about frivolous things. My mother and her generation used it a lot as: “I was gabbing on the phone with Anna May Mitchell for an hour,” or “that Tess Burnside really likes to gab!” It seemed my mother and her friends spent a lot of time “gabbing.” This was a time in the 1950s when most women didn’t work outside of the home. My mother was a very social person. I’ve heard that she loved to tell stories and make people laugh. In fact, I’m told she liked to laugh a lot herself. This was not the mother I saw at home. No. That mother was tight-lipped and stern. In our house, the telephone was in the dining room on a little table in the corner. While on the phone, my mother would sit on a straight-backed chair, smoke her Winstons, and talk for hours. I sometimes crouched in the pantry and listened in. It wasn’t what they discussed that interested me. No. I longed to hear the voice of that other “mother.” The one I never saw or heard. When she laughed, I laughed.To myself, of course.


glimpse
Margaret Walker
 
Mama made her way along our quiet beach at least once every day. Litter bag in hand, she collected the debris left behind by tourists.This was no leisurely stroll. Mama strode rapidly with frequent bends to pick up a piece of garbage and numerous side trips to the trash bins to dump her full sack of litter. She kept her eyes peeled for treasures — sea turtle tracks, unusual shells, sand dollars and anyone she might know. One afternoon Mama suddenly headed toward a group of people some distance away. A woman about her age jumped up. She and Mama hugged and chattered and hugged again. Clearly, long-lost friends. I wandered in that direction and stood next to a man about my age. We just watched — waiting to be introduced. No introduction. Odd. Then the two women stopped, looked closely at each other — and said “Oh, I thought you were somebody else!” I was mortified. Not Mama. Not the other woman. They began to laugh. This quickly became a conversation of “Where are you from?” and “Do you know so-and-so…?” Connections were made. Introductions. Finding a new friend. Walks with Mama embracing her world.
 

goodness
Pris Campbell

……GRACIOUS, GREAT BALLS OF FIRE! Jerry Lee Lewis waves his curly hair, bangs on the piano with fingers, butt and feet, belting out his hit song in the joint fifties rock and roll concert at the Charlotte Coliseum in North Carolina. Backstage, Chuck Berry and other icons of the era await their turn to astonish. I’m 15, old enough to have my drivers license the year before but our mothers insisted — one of them must chaperone my two friends and me on this hour-long trek from our tiny town just over the South Carolina state line. My mother got the short straw. The music is wild. Teenagers are screaming. A couple is mouth to mouth on the steps next to us. Mother is fearless. She calmly tells two drunk boys sitting behind us that my name is Priscilla when someone sings the song by that title, humiliating me. They sing along with the song, poking at my shoulders and laughing hilariously. Mother says nothing, no lectures on how disgusting it was when we get home, despite her earlier lectures about Elvis and his swiveling hips. I think secretly she enjoyed that night of being a teen again, rediscovering a different sort of youth through the magic of rock and roll.


garter belt
Theresa A. Cancro

After I got my ears pierced on my twelfth birthday, I set my sights on other "adult" milestones. Persuading my mom to let me get my ears pierced had not been easy. When she was my age, few girls in her school had pierced ears; it was considered quite exotic. Some of my older friends were already wearing stockings with garter belts, which seemed very grown-up and sophisticated. I begged my mother for one, but she didn't think I was old enough. Yet. I waited another year and a half . . . . Christmas morning 1969, a slender box peeked out from my holiday stocking. I ripped into it to find a lacy garter belt along with fishnet stockings in hot pink and lime green. I was elated and felt so grown-up. But when I wore them to parties — not to school — the elastic bands shifted, the rubber clips pressed into my legs when I sat down, and the lace was scratchy. They were awful! Luckily, pantyhose had just become popular. My garter belt eventually made its way to the bottom of my underwear drawer and was forgotten.


glf
Tina Wright

The G.L.F. was our local farm supply cooperative, a big wooden store near the village railroad tracks in Moravia with a feed mill and grain storage bins and always sweet smelling of milled grain and molasses and harsh smelling of chemicals and fertilizers. I loved going there with my father, especially in August when we brought our just-harvested oats there in our big truck. We were part of the action! And best of all, I usually got a nickel (or dime?) to buy a Coke from the machine. The Coke was in a small heavy bottle, less than 12 ounces, and you pulled it from metal hands that let it go when the coin clicked through. G.L.F. stood for Grange League Federation, born of the farmers’ cooperative movement by three organizations, the Grange, the Dairyman’s League and the Farm Bureau Federation and part of my upbringing was to respect all of these like a UAW family would their union. Fiercely. There were G.L.F.s all over farm country in upstate New York then and now they are called Agway and no one thinks of them that way anymore.    


glasses
Zee Zahava

I complain to Mom that I can’t see what is written on the blackboard and she writes a letter to my teacher, asking if I could change seats and sit in the front row. The teacher suggests that I get my eyes checked. She doesn’t want me to change seats because she likes all of us to sit in alphabetical order. But anyway, it is a good thing that I have my eyes checked because it turns out I need glasses. My first pair have candy cane frames. Mom’s choice. She says they are adorable. I hate them. I wonder why my mother is so enthusiastic about eyeglass frames with a red and white striped pattern when I am not allowed to eat candy cane candy. It is a Christmas treat for most people but apparently it is not appropriate for Jewish children. At least that’s how it is in my family.

R is for . . .

remembering
Alan Bern
 
Washing my hands, I recalled a rat visitor years back. Unwelcome. At night she must have bitten at our fruit and chewed our bar soap. Named it “Lou.” One night we heard Lou skittering around the kitchen. I thought I’d cornered her. She was way too fast. Lou could flatten, then squeeze under doors to escape. Fast, agile, smart. We didn’t want any rats inside so we tried peanut-buttered traps. Lou just ate the peanut butter off the traps, escaped when the traps snapped. Frustrated, we called Clint at Rat Patrol. Clint examined our basement level, showed us all the spaces rats could enter. Clint’s solution: close every space with wire mesh, then trap the rats remaining inside. Rats lived out in the brush and came in for warmth and food. “What would happen to the rats in the brush once they couldn’t get into our house,” we asked. “They’ll go to your neighbors,” said Clint. Very happy to see no more rats and sorry for our neighbors. No rats were ever trapped in Clint’s traps so Lou must have gone next door. Not sure Lou was a “she.” And we’ve seen no rats in our house for thirty years.


racloir                    
Alan Peat

A racloir is a Middle Paleolithic flint implement used, we presume, for scraping and cutting hides. We mainly found waste flakes, the debris of flint knapping. They’re everywhere, but a tool, now they come along less often so my heart was racing when I pulled it from the riverbank mud, sharp as the day it was made. I shouted the others over and, excitedly, we handed it around. And there I stood, dressed in my wellingtons and waterproofs; the first person to hold it since the Stone Age. Driving home, I wondered what he or she might have looked like; what their hopes and fears were; what their life was like? I’ve held arrowheads, axes, blades, flakes . . . and once a racloir. And each of them draws me back, over and over again, to the filth of the Thames foreshore. Some days the pickings are lean but when we are lucky, there among the plastic bags and face masks, we find some fragment of a long ago life. And for a moment we hold the past lightly in our hands and the forgotten dead breathe once again.


round
Ann Carter

R is for round, as in the Round Circle. I don’t know how it started, calling it the Round Circle. But we did, everybody in the neighborhood called it that. I remember clearly shouting out, “I’m going up to the Round Circle,” probably on my bicycle to meet one of the neighbor kids. But mostly it stands out as a place we gathered when it snowed. A section of the street encircled a bit of land and formed a woodsy island at the point where Graystone Drive and Don Avenue met. The hill flattened out there and formed a natural gathering spot on the days when snow caused school to be canceled. In skimpy rubber boots and mittens, the neighborhood kids met there, sleds in tow, ready to challenge each other’s courage and endurance. Sometimes there would be four of us stacked on top of each other, belly to back, all facing forward, our sled careening down Graystone Drive. There were deep ditches on either side and a concrete culvert at the bottom, putting us close enough to disaster if the person steering was less than skilled at tight maneuvers. More often than not we were propelled off the sled as we flew around the curve between the Orell’s and the Stoke’s houses. If we were lucky we made it around the curve and coasted to a slow stop as the road gently began to rise. Piling off, we’d start our trek back up to the Round Circle, ride after ride. Sometimes the parents joined us, usually at dusk, and they would build a bonfire and make hot chocolate. I’m sure by then our toes were numb and little cheeks brilliant red from the cold. Years later I made a painting, those words, “the round circle,” painted lightly on an oval-shaped surface.


running
Anne Killian Russo

When it all began I was by myself, and actually walking, not running. And it was taking more time than I wanted it to. So, I challenged myself to try running.  Before I knew it, I ran two miles without stopping. I ran from that day on with a group of girlfriends, through all kinds of weather, in the quiet early morning hours before our work days began. People shooshed us from above when our laughter and voices shook them out of deep sleep as we passed under their darkened windows.  We ran mostly in New York, but covered other states on raucous road trips where shopping, eating, and sightseeing made the running seem secondary. We ran through joys and sorrows, growing children, jobs, infidelities, divorces, and even cancer. Through town, around the lake, in 5, 10, and 15k races, half marathons and full marathons. For days, weeks, months, years, and decades. And almost suddenly, we didn't. In one of our races, cancer won. In another, geographical change disassembled our gaggle of girls. These days, I'm on my own again, but with a knee that resists steady running; it enjoys and allows long luxurious walks that take longer, like they did when this whole running thing started. I miss the running. I miss the girls. But, I don't seem to mind the time the walks take. Things are different now.


ride
Antonia Matthew 

The Fair is in town. I'm six, here with my mother and Mrs. Castle. We look for a ride and see one called “The Moon Rocket,” with brass rocket-shaped cars on a track that goes round a model of the top of the world. Mrs. Castle  says, “Let's take this one.” My mother says, “Mercia, Tonia's sick on a bus ride, she won't like this one.” Mrs. Castle asks me, “Would you like to go on this ride?” I nod my head. My mother shrugs, “I’m going to the Coconut Shy” and walks away. Mrs. Castle buys tickets and we climb into one of the rockets. A man shouts, “all aboard for the moon.” The ride begins to move. It starts slowly, then speeds up, faster and faster. The ride goes on and on until, at last, it begins to slow down and finally it stops. We get out carefully. I'm feeling sick. Mrs. Castle looks pale. She takes my hand. We go round to the back of the ride and throw up on the grass. Then Mrs. Castle wipes both of our mouths with a handkerchief. We look at each other and start laughing. “This is our secret,” she says and I nod my head. She takes my hand and we walk quickly towards the Coconut Shy.


relaxing
Barbara Brazill

This is the quiet hour except for the constant rumble of thunder rolling in from somewhere in some direction and the buzz of the refrigerator motor keeping my ice cubes chilled and the frenzied whoosh of wind holding hands with the abrupt crackle of thunder and the ping ping of leaves hitting the side of the house and the splat splat splat of the rain pelting the windows and the swish of a car’s wheels spinning on the hot wet pavement and the squiggly scratch of my pencil sliding across the paper and the ahhh of my breath exhaling . . . yes this has been the quiet hour and it has been so relaxing.


religion
Barrie Levine

My son Max took off for a summer youth program in Israel after his junior year in college. He returned with a passion for finding new meaning in Judaism. We always belonged to a temple and observed holiday traditions, but my son took on orthodox observances and began dressing in the manner of religious men in a white shirt, black slacks, and skullcap. Many families become estranged when a child turns religious, even if in the religion of birth. But my son’s committed life is rooted in the grandfather for whom he was named and my grandmother who sewed her Sabbath candlesticks into her voluminous skirt for safekeeping on the journey to America. Max moved to Israel three days after graduation. Friends and family expressed concern that he was immersed in a cult, as the many rules about kosher food, dress codes for men and women, and thrice daily prayer services seem repressive through a secular lens. But when I visit my son and his family in their religious neighborhood, no one ever tries to proselytize me into becoming orthodox. Simply being a mother and grandmother elevates me to honored status in the community. I couldn’t feel more accepted.


ridiculous
Blue Waters

One of my special friends in grade school, Vera Unruh, had a hard time pronouncing words. One day during recess we were talking about our school’s stupid dress code. Neither of us appreciated being forced to wear a dress instead of the jeans we preferred. “That’s so ridiculous!” I shouted. Vera picked up on that and shouted “Yeah, that’s ridikkelus!” We both had a good laugh. I decided I preferred the sound of ridikkelus over ridiculous and imitated her with great joy. We decided that we would shout the word out loud together whenever one of us gave the “sign,” which was to point a finger to the tip of the nose. We started giving each other the sign as soon as we got back to our classroom. “That’s ridikkelus!” It was nice, for a change, to have someone with me when we both got sent to the principal’s office for “insubordination.” Whatever that meant.


rucksack
Carole Johnston

Once I was a rucksack wanderer, hitchhiking, like my hero, Kerouac. I owned nothing but the rucksack, hiking shoes, jeans, and a blue work shirt. I was 27, escaped from teaching high school, still in love with Beat writers. John and I meandered up the east coast from New York to Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, Ontario, Quebec City, Montreal, Toronto. In The Dharma Bums, Japhy Rider says “… I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution, thousands or even millions of rucksack wanderers …” I read the words and followed. Scent of pine trees and hot wind, hitching along sandy back roads to all the beaches of Maine, deep summer heat baking into us. Once, we stood in torrential rain under a bridge near Quebec City, got a ride with some drunk Quebecois teenagers who let us crash in their purple-lighted, aluminum, cave-like apartment in Montreal. We wandered for six months, the road stretching out before us like a mirage. Decades later, a therapist told me I must have had a death wish, putting myself in danger like that. Danger? Never thought about it. I was busy being a rucksack wanderer. Adventure was my middle name.


rainbow
Deborah Burke Henderson
 
Many years ago, perhaps inspired by the pet rock fad, my sister took to painting rocks a powdery blue hue. Paintbrush and acrylics in hand, she would depict a rainbow cropping out of and dipping back into twin puffy white clouds, centering the word “Smile!” underneath. She sent me one such memento maybe ten years ago, and it sits near Mr. Potato Head (one of my muses) on my writing desk. That rock has always been a cherished possession, but now even more so. My sister Robin passed away just a few months back, on June 24, the morning of the Strawberry Moon. I know that I will think of her every time I see a rainbow.


risk
Emily Johnson

Speaking those words out loud would be taking a big risk. She knew that. It could mean the end of everything. The end of their marriage. Of their family. Of the home she had known for twenty-three years. It could mean her children turning against her, blaming her, never wanting to see her again. And what about him? It would come as a shock, something he would never have expected. He might hit her — something he’d never done before. Maybe he’d cry. She’d never seen him do that either. And where would she go? With what she made as an adjunct at the college she could barely afford a motel room. And yet . . .  speaking the words could mean freedom. It could mean the beginning of a new life — a life in which she could make her own decisions. She knew some of them would be the wrong ones, but she’d learn from them. She’d grow! Not feel like the undernourished, stunted flower she’d become, dying day by day. She could do it. She would do it. She would look in his eyes and say the words: “I don’t love you anymore.”


reflections
Frank Muller

As a young child, I believed that reflections were doorways to parallel universes. I would stand in the bathroom staring into the mirror on the medicine cabinet for long stretches, hoping to catch my twin blinking when I had not, or glancing sidewards in reaction to my sister’s pleading to get in. I would tilt my head forward until our foreheads touched, imagining at that moment that we could hear each other’s thoughts. His were exactly the same as mine. As I grew older the rock-solid conviction in these beliefs waned somewhat, but never completely vanished. Sometimes today I still imagine that reflections are doorways allowing us to pass back and forth between our mirrored realms. Last winter while hiking in a snowy forest I came upon an ebony pool of standing water, stained inky black by decaying leaf litter. Not a single molecule of air seemed to move from its current position. The pool surface resembled polished obsidian, reflecting the moody clouds and bare treetops above. I leaned forward, and there below me was my twin, much older now, staring up into my soul. I quickly clutched a nearby tree trunk to refrain from jumping on top of him!


retirement
Jim Mazza
 
Be prepared, a friend advises, everyone will want to know what you are going to do in retirement. Sure enough, after the congratulations come the questions. What are your plans? What’s on your bucket list?  Much to their disappointment, my responses are vague and I have few specifics to offer. For the first time in my life, I happily have no plans! Will I write a little? Surely. Shoot photos? Most likely. Travel? My bags are packed! Finally learn Italian? It’s doubtful.  It’s about being rather than doing, I explain. Most just stare at me, flabbergasted. I have two simple notions in my mind for approaching the years ahead. The first is to nurture and care for those spaces and places where I find comfort, beauty, and connection — my home, garden, and community. The second is to live gently, yet with enthusiasm and curiosity. That is: walking instead of driving, lingering over good books and conversations with friends, and making space to learn, reflect and, whenever possible, celebrate. So, I tell the inquisitive: There’s no “bucket list,” it’s more of an “anything-is-possible list” . . . And that, absent the prix fixe menu of must-dos, is a thrilling view of the future.


reflection
Joan Leotta

Passing by a mirror or a shop window, I see an older woman who resembles me — then realize she is me, gray, drained of  brightness, diminished. Lately though, I remembered one of my favorite folk tales — about a young man whose task was to pull a golden vase from a pond. Others before him had tried and failed. He studied the area, noted a tree’s limbs spread across the pond. When his turn came, instead of leaping into the water, he climbed the tree. It was only the reflection of the vase that shone in the water. The solid gold vase was in the tree all along.
I realize this is true with my own reflection — in mirrors, store windows, the eyes of others. My reflection is only an imperfect imitation of the reality of who I am. My ability to love, to learn, to encourage others is burnished, not diminished by age. Now, when I pass a mirror, I am not fooled by the old woman who smiles back at me. My real self is deep within. I am not my reflection.


rob
Kath Abela Wilson

His closest friends called him that. His life was stolen suddenly, as if a large bird swooped down and took it like a sandwich or a fish. It was an elegant bird that was his downfall, though, his passion. Each day carrying heavy equipment, a camera with a large lens, to watch their mating dance by the river, their nest, their babies. “They're in love,” he told me. And so was he. After months, he started to feel more and more tired, falling asleep early before he could compile. Finally one night he fell in his studio. Next morning they found him and sent him for care. He called me and I said “What happened? I think those herons tired you out.” “Yes,” he said. A week later he was gone. His paintings and photos — a hundred herons line our walls. I still expect at any moment his cheerful return, his friendly slow gait and stories, if only, back to our home gallery, with new work . . . .


rattle-skull
Kathleen Kramer

If you’d heard him call her, my younger sister, “Rattle-skull,” you might have thought our dad an unkind man. He was not. But Suellen could try the patience of even the kindest of men with her misadventures and dramatics, such as threatening to throw herself down the stairs when she was denied some small request. And one of our mother’s occasional adjectives for Suellen was “slathery,” for my sister could scatter socks and training bras and mess up the neatest of rooms, especially the small bedroom we shared. Even her sweet, loving heart tended to be rattle-skulled as, one after another, she chose boys, then men, who were lost and, in spite of her earnest love, could not be saved. Then inside that very special brain, there was a rupture, and Suellen was left blind and paralyzed and often without speech. For four and a half years, she lived in a rehab home, where she would never be rehabbed. And our dad and mother came faithfully, though without much faith in a recovery, to that place, bringing treats and songs and love. Every holiday season, Dad would decorate Suellen’s room with posters — jack-o-lanterns, turkeys, Santa Claus. And he’d tell her about them, knowing she could see them in her imagination, inside that dear, damaged Rattle-skull.


regret
Laurinda Lind
 
R is for that, at least. Yesterday I picked up a stone from the shore of Lake Champlain and, due to the magic of years collapsing into one another, stood by Lake of the Woods, meaning to release it there. This also starts with R. But I couldn’t. Because as my thumb traveled the smooth gray grain, I stared into white calcite veins threading dark shale and somehow saw Renee, my now-dead friend, who was deposited with geologic force into my life in fifth grade. On both sides of the stone, ancient calcium carbonate sketches a veil across silt from an old ocean floor. That is Renee, another R word. Hidden front and back. For once in my life, as I looked into the waters of this much smaller lake gouged out by an ice sheet, Renee chose me and I knew that if I kept the stone in my pocket instead, she would finally explain those thirty years she kept herself inaccessible as a nun buried at sea. So far all she says is: she sees me now. As if a glacier finally lifted off and melted away north, it is a great relief. Which also starts with R.


roast
Margaret Dennis

My mother thought she was a good cook. When I mentioned this to my older sister recently, she scoffed and said “all she ever cooked were roasts!” That was partly true. My father owned a butcher shop and brought home fresh meat. Every Sunday we had a roast: pork, lamb, beef on a rotating basis. Never chicken; my mother looked down on chicken. Oh, we had side dishes:  potatoes, gravy, and a vegetable, usually canned (except on Easter when we had to have fresh asparagus). I actually liked Monday meals the best. Then we had leftovers and we also ate in the kitchen. Our Sunday meals took place in the dining room where we ate at a formal table draped in a white linen table cloth. There was a lot of silence then. Usually, all you could hear was our silverware clinking against our best china. The kitchen was a bit livelier, but not much. I don’t know how my mother decided to raise us in this formal, stiff way. She had grown up in a raucous family with eight siblings. She must have thought that her approach was better. It wasn’t! If she were here today I would never tell her that. I would never say she wasn’t a good cook. After all, her roasts were delicious!


roxanne
Pris Campbell

When I was a teaching assistant in grad school he was an undergrad in one of my study group classes and was sweet on me, always lingering after with some contrived question. Tall and attractive he was three years younger and seemed even younger in the cloak of his shyness. He had “Cyrano de Bergerac” on tape in French in his apartment, he told me one day, with a hesitant invitation. A borderline no no, for me to say yes, but I wanted to hear this magnificent play in French. “She creates grace in her own image, brings heaven to earth in one movement of her hand,” says Cyrano. The romance of it overtook us. By the end I was Roxanne. She realized he was the one she loved as he was dying. Too late for them, we made love in their place. The lovers had their time together, after all, through our bodies. Embarrassed, he never spoke to me after class again. Embarrassed, I ignored his averted eyes and was glad when the semester ended.


rain
Sue Norvell

Yes, I do feel uncomfortable grumbling, even just a little bit. So many parts of our country would be grateful for a tenth of our damp aggravation. Still, it has rained yet again: another persistent soaking that just won’t quit. It feels as if this has been the motif for the summer. Each week it seems we’ve again had to slosh our way through puddles to the Wednesday Farmers’ Market. In the backyard, grass has not dried to the usual late summer toasted-almond brown. Even now, the lush still-green lawn squooshes underfoot as I walk out to the bird bath. With rain so frequent, I haven’t had to refill that large terra cotta saucer often, but mosquitos are loving it, so it has to be emptied, cleaned, and refilled to rid it of the wrigglers. Today the hill trails were just dry enough for my husband and his friend to hike without too much muddy difficulty. An unexpected, glorious, generous patch of vivid yellow-orange chanterelle mushrooms bordered the trail! Each picked a share and left enough for some other lucky hiker. These beautiful mushrooms loved those warm, extensive rains! We have chanterelles for supper and they will be delicious, I’m sure. Perhaps I should stop my grumbling and start cooking.


roka
Theresa A. Cancro
 
Roka was an american kestrel — the smallest falcon — and my link to the wild, a glimpse into the soul of wildness itself. When Roka was a chick, he was knocked out of his nest and found by a teen. Roka imprinted on the boy who wasn't able to properly care for him. So he brought Roka to the local wild bird rehabilitation center. Later when I volunteered at the clinic, Roka was a “resident bird.” I was lucky to work with him on a biweekly basis. I took him out for walks on a falconer's glove among the tall grasses of nearby fields. I could sense that untamed part of him when his eyes focused on the distance, alert to all sounds and movement, crouching momentarily as if preparing to launch into the clear blue sky. In the evening as I left after my volunteer shift in the clinic, I'd call, “Good night, Roka,” towards his corn crib digs, and he'd respond with soft chirrups and trills. I looked forward to our walks and my peek into the heart of a wild bird. Roka later passed on to the realm of forever fields and skies where he now flies freely.


rockaway
Zee Zahava

My family leaves our sweltering Bronx apartment and moves into a tiny summer bungalow in Rockaway, just a short walk from the ocean. On Friday nights my sister and I go to the boardwalk and pitch nickels, hoping to win a goldfish or a stuffed animal. We spend a lot of nickels but we never win anything. I become friends with a slightly older girl named Shulamith. I tell her I’ll be learning French when school starts up again in the fall and she instructs me to practice rolling my r’s. You can’t speak French if you don’t roll your r’s, she proclaims, with all the authority of an 8th grader. Rrrrriver, I say, as we walk on the beach in our skimpy two-piece bathing suits. That makes her giggle. Rrrrradiator. Rrrrrailroad. Shulamith tells me I’m hilarious. Rrrrrotten. Rrrrringolevio.  She can’t stop laughing. Rrrrrazzmatazz. I don’t know where I get that from, it just pops into my brain. Rrrrrazzmatazz, Shulamith repeats, almost choking with delight. Rrrrrazzmatazz, she says again, practically screaming the word. She grabs my hand and gives my fingers a hard squeeze. We’re going to be best friends for life, she declares. But I never see her again after that summer at Rockaway Beach.

M is for . . . .

 
mia
Alan Bern

Every step unmentioned. The creek moved to the falls. The baby rattler slipped off from the water onto sand and into brush. Mia lay back over smooth rock naked in the sun with her arms open to the breeze. Waterfalling sounds increased as the sun began to go down. I climbed up. Then we lay together side-by-side, nothing between us. Our sounds were half-words, then questions. Our tongues touched. Answers. Dinner was small and uncooked. We slept under 1000 stars. Under light blankets.


mustard
Antonia Matthew

My aunt lived in a residential hotel. Some days when I visited, I played with the hotel manager’s daughter. In the morning, we helped set the tables for lunch. Each round table had a stiff white table cloth, napkins, a small vase, and a silver cruet set. We fetched the cruet sets, brought them to the workroom and set them on the table to be filled. The mustard pots were round and silver with three bent feet, a fancy handle and a tiny spike on the top of the lid, to lift it up. Inside was a small, deep blue glass bowl that reflected the light, and a tiny silver spoon shaped like a ladle. When the lid was shut, the thin handle fitted into an opening in the lid. Our job was to fill the blue bowls with mustard that was already mixed. We used tiny coffee spoons to spoon out the mustard and a cloth to wipe off any spills. Then we carefully put the bowls back inside the pots, slipped in the spoons and closed the lids. When all the cruets were filled, we put them inside their silver holders and carried them back to the tables.


marigolds
Barbara Brazill

Marigolds on the small table soft as silk.


marilyn
Barrie Levine

My cousin and I were fervent movie fans in the 1950s. We made up scrapbooks and traded photos of glamorous Hollywood stars. But Marilyn Monroe was our idol, and we followed her life story and career faithfully. I decided to write to Marilyn herself at Twentieth Century Fox to request an autographed picture. By return mail I received an 8×10 black and white glossy of Marilyn leaning against a draped satin background and wearing a sparkling diamond necklace, with an inscription in bright red ink addressed to me. My mom gave me permission to place a long-distance telephone call to my cousin to share the exciting news. Forty years later, a woman brought in the same photo of MM to Antiques Roadshow. The appraiser flipped out and said that Marilyn herself had used red ink, estimating the value at $5,000. It was later determined through archival research that studio secretaries customarily signed for Marilyn, regardless of the ink color. The potential to sell it to help pay my daughter’s tuition was no longer an issue. Instead, I got to keep the treasured photo of the sweet, sad, and beautiful movie star who I adored as a teen, and still do.


muddles
Blue Waters

When I was a kid I took great pride in the fine art of making mud pies. I called my favorite creations “muddles.” It was a simple and yet complicated procedure. I started by turning on the outside faucet and letting water collect in a dusty patch of the front lawn. Then I’d climb a nearby tree for a while to watch the water soak in deeply. Soon it was time to jump into the muddy pool and get to work. With my trusty shovel I dug up many clumps of mud and stacked them in my little red wagon. Then I’d find a special place to build a giant muddle. I’d grab up handfuls of gooey mud and mold them into sassy little shapes, giving each one some love and individual character. When I had a whole lot of mud pies I started piling them on top of each other to make a waist-high formation. A muddle was born and began its life. That could be a long time or last only until the neighbor’s St. Bernard toppled it. I didn’t care. The making of another muddle was just a day or two away. That was the fun part, after all.


music
Carole Johnston

Music can cause a soul to quake. Recently, I heard Abigail Washburn sing an old time Appalachian Mountain song, “Bright Morning Stars.” This song is usually sung as a round in traditional shape note style. Hearing this type of singing helps a person appreciate Appalachian culture. I had heard Abigail’s “warbly” voice before, but this song struck a chord in my heart. I don’t use words like soul and heart often, but what else can I say? I was stunned. I could not move. My skin began to vibrate, from legs and arms, to scalp. I quivered and quaked. This song came from England to Kentucky, with the Shakers, and it has enthralled audiences here for centuries. I was not born or raised in Kentucky but I am overwhelmed by the rich cultural heritage even though I do not share it. I do not quite fit in here. But the mountains call out to me. Traditional, Appalachian music strums in my bones. It echoes from a past life. “Day is a-breaking in my soul.”


marked
Christina Martin

“It's in the kitchen, it's in the kitchen!”  My little girl's screams are part wonder, part horror. I rush into the kitchen fully expecting to see a wild animal at the very least, ferociously lolling its tongue and baring its fangs, but no. The carrier pigeon (I notice a tag on its pink leathery leg) is sitting on the counter and then goes to hide behind the corn flakes box. Very ungainly it looks, with its prehistoric head and black bead eyes, but kind of pathetic. My daughter pushes her head forward excitedly, wanting to see. It's all a game of what to do to help the pigeon. When it finally leaves, I feel the slightest touch of feather-breath on my cheek. I smile, gently marked for peace.


monster
Deborah Burke Henderson

my monster has always been lying in wait, just below the surface, ready to pounce … but i’ve learned to lift my head, straighten my spine, and, once again, tell it to “back off.” why this intensity, this undercurrent, this trace of fear that pervades my being? of what am i afraid? failure, i suspect. not being good or worthy enough. i fall into the trap of comparing myself with others and often fall short. i subscribe to a higher power, yet still there are these doubts, these stirrings. when i surrender, though, and move within the ebb and flow of the universe, something beautiful happens. when i engage in creativity, strength and guidance find me, and contentment fills me. letting go and being mindful are key. looking at the naked truth head on, i push through it, again and again. my monster keeps me on tippy toe; i guess i wouldn’t have it any other way.


m
Emily Johnson

m sounds murmur and mumble and bumble and hum. They’re music and moonlight and mountains and mist. They’re Jiminy Cricket and pink bubblegum. They’re Mesopotamia, mummies in pits. Hummingbirds, memories, hominy grits.   

memory
Ian M. Shapiro

I just arrived home, it's later than I thought. I'm writing to you because I'm trying to understand it all. Seeing you across the street, and saying oh my god, is that you? And seeing you say, is that you? And seeing your eyes. And trying to understand time and distance and love and all. And asking if you have time for tea. And walking together, and talking together, and all we remember, and then, even more, all we simply don't. How is that possible? And you ask if I still tell stories. And you ask whether stories are just a means, a means to create a common memory, simply because we don't remember the same things? Is that all that stories are? If that's all stories are, then I'm done with stories, I just want my memory back. I want our memories back. But I don't accept it. I want our memories and our stories too. I'm just trying to understand, just trying to recall. It was so good to see you. It was so good to walk. It was so good to talk. It was so good to sit and have tea. With love.

message
Jack Goldman

Last year, before the Fall, I was awakened at sunrise by the tapping of a woodpecker pecking at a telephone pole outside my window. I grumbled a bit, but dismissed the incident until the stubborn bird returned, tapping on the pole like a telegraph operator sending an urgent message. This year the street is silent and I am kept awake by the woodpecker’s absence.

 
mortified
Jim Mazza
 
Stepping into the small shop, I am overcome by the smell. Cheeses, meats, garlic, olives engulf my senses. So saturated is the air that I consider turning my back or covering my nose. But this reaction quickly gives way to the pleasure of it, eliciting memories of holiday dinners with my sizable Italian-American family . . . of home. What is it about briny sardines, peppery salami, and roasted chestnuts that evoke such feelings of comfort? This is my first trip to Italy, and I’m eager to absorb every aroma, every flavor. Behind the counter stands a stout woman clad in a tightly wrapped apron. I croak a meek, “Buongiorno.” She smiles with encouragement, but I immediately regret my poor language skills. I stammer: “Mozzarella?”  She responds: “Si, signore, mortadella,” reaching for a cylinder of fat-flecked sausage. “No, no, signora. Mozzarella,” I say, a little louder. Her: “Mortadella?”  Me: “No, mozzarella.” Clearly, something is wrong. “Maaah-za-RAAAY-LA,” I say again, pointing towards the soft globes floating in milky water. “Ah, capisco,” she roars, “MOH-zah-rell-ah!” Using her bare hand she cradles the large, dripping cheese, holding it aloft for me to inspect. Mortified by my ugly mispronunciations, I can only nod. Relieved, she asks, “EEEt’s okay?”


mouse
Joan Leotta

At five-thirty, one morning, when I opened the door to my pantry to pull out the cereal for the children’s breakfast, a small gray mouse blinked out at me. I screamed. She ran. I shivered when I read about the diseases mice carry. I called an exterminator for more information. It seems roadwork destroyed nearby woods, and a cold spell combined to make Mama Mouse leave the woods for our home while we were vacationing a few weeks earlier. “They likely entered through the garage,” the exterminator told me, “from there into your basement, then up to your pantry.” I have to admit, I felt a certain sympathy with the mouse mother who had looked for food and safe housing for her family. But my children’s health came first. I bought traps. I bought containers for food. Steel wool for garage panels.As I scoured the pantry, boxed all food items into tin and plastic, I thought about my strategy. Mama mouse was hard to trap, but a have-a-heart trap found her. In the basement, I discovered a nest and hoped it was the only one. Carefully, I bagged both for removal. Sorry, Mouse. House is ours, woods are yours.


modesty
Judith Sornberger

When instructing her daughters to be modest, our mother meant “dressing or behaving so as to avoid impropriety or indecency” (OED). We girls wore dresses or skirts to school, so the first lesson in being ladylike was to keep your knees together while sitting so no one could see up your skirt. In our teens, Mom tried to convince us that it was more enticing to leave something to the imagination than to reveal too much of our bodies. This advice usually popped up when we shopped for bathing suits. A two-piece that looked innocent on the hanger often became too revealing, in her eyes, once on my developing figure. I’d pose before the fitting room mirror, delighted by the way it showed a bit of cleavage and my navel, knowing Mom would nix it when I stepped out. Leaving something to the imagination was a hard sell to a fifteen-year-old. But it showed she wasn’t only trying to keep me modest, that she thought being sexy, in a limited way, was a good thing, acknowledging me as a young woman with choices about the way she presented herself to the world. And, perhaps best of all, one a boy might imagine things about.


monday
Kathleen Kramer

This is the way we wash our clothes, wash our clothes, wash our clothes. This is the way we wash our clothes so early Monday morning. I feel safe and happy when we sing this in Mrs. Errigo’s first grade class because I know that my mother and my grandma are doing what the song says. At our house, up on the hill, they’re trundling the big, wringer washer from the spare room onto the kitchen linoleum. They’re filling it with lots of hot water, heated on the stove. They’re putting the first load — the white clothes — into the wide mouth of the washer. And now the agitator is turning back and forth, back and forth — chugga-chug, chugga-chug. If I were home, I might try to dance to it, but doing the wash is important work and Mother and Grandma have to be careful not to get their fingers caught in the wringer rollers that squeeze the clothes through and plop them into the rinse tub on the other side. If I were home — sick with a cold, maybe — I’d be in my bed upstairs, under the quilt made by Aunt Helen, and the chugga-chug, chugga-chug of the washing machine would be like a daytime lullaby.


mmmm…
Katrina Morse
 
When most mothers in the 1960s were mixing up cakes from boxes iced with frosting from a can and heating up TV dinners in aluminum trays for their families, my mother only made food from “scratch.” There was a brief time when we ate squishy white Wonder Bread packaged in the plastic bag printed with colorful circles that always reminded me of a circus. But then she started making Anadama Bread, with its molasses and cornmeal making it a hearty toast and sandwich bread. Sugar was not something to cut back on then. We ate homemade macaroni and cheese (topped with ketchup), grape jelly omelets, Joy of Cooking recipe for hot fudge sauce on vanilla ice cream, and grandma’s recipe for chocolate cake with chocolate icing.  Granola, potato bread with a swirled cinnamon filling, snickerdoodle cookies. She did use some time-saving frozen vegetables. Sadly they were always overcooked and heavily salted. Lima beans, eww! Soggy spinach. Overcooked cauliflower, yuk! But oh the memories of freshly baked bread. I can still conjure up the heavenly smell on the warm blast of heat from the oven. Wait just a bit until it cools and then slather a slice with soft butter. Mmmm…


monster
Margaret Dennis

I am scared of monsters. When I was little, I was sure there was a monster in my bedroom closet. Even though I shared a room with my little brother, I was certain he was coming for me. At bedtime, my mother insisted that all lights be off and the door tightly shut. Every night I would pull the covers up and lie as still as I could, and as flat as I could, hoping that when the monster came out he wouldn’t know I was there. When that didn’t stop making me feel scared, I would quietly get up, open the bedroom door and tiptoe to the top of the stairs. I could usually hear the radio on as my mother and father listened to their favorite shows. I would eventually get up the courage to call down. “Mommie, can I open the door and have the hall light on?” She would come to the bottom of the stairs and say harshly “No! Get back to bed!” I would scurry back to bed, but this exchange would be repeated until she would threaten to “come up there!” I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but I would return to bed. Monster or no monster, I didn’t want my mother’s wrath. Funny, these days I find I always sleep with a teeny tiny night light on.


moonflower
Marilyn Ashbaugh

It was love at first sight. I saw her in a neighbor’s garden at dusk on my summer walk. I mistook her for a morning glory, albeit one with poor timing. Before my eyes she began unfurling in her whirling-dervish way as she revealed her inner glow. I wanted her for my garden but I never saw her again.


medusa
Miriam Sagan

In our girls’ school uniforms we watch “Le Chien Andalu” in the auditorium. I’d rather be in the bathroom, hanging out and smoking Balkan Sobranies with my friend Juliet. She favors the black ones with the gold filters. They taste of elsewhere. A hole opens in the man’s palm and ants crawl in and out. I’m unimpressed. We have plenty of ants, in every sandy crack in the sidewalk. My father is at war with all nature, setting mouse and ant traps all over the house. And yelling at us if we leave the sugar bowl uncovered. But he is losing the battle. An old mop abandoned on the back porch is colonized by yellow jackets who build a nest in its snaky Medusa head. My father’s three daughters swell from flat-chested childhood into the busty rebellion of womanhood. We roll up our uniform skirts and show our legs, a shadow between the thighs. We believe, for the first time, that we are real, and begin to act accordingly.


maritime
Pris Campbell

Fourteen months of love letters from Vietnam and my fiancé’s ship is returning to Pearl Harbor for its four month break between tours. I’ve taken a job in Hawaii as a psychologist the last three months while I wait. Navy pay, even for an ensign, is poverty level so we’ll need my money to save for our future. The ship steams into the harbor channel finally, our crepe paper lei carried to meet it by a tug boat. Lei draped over the bow in the scented air, we wait, as sailors, all in dress white, stand in formation on deck. The navy band plays as the ship docks. My heart flutters. My stomach does the rumba. Two months later, my love and I rush out from the chapel under a vee of swords. Our reception is also the first big welcome home party, held at a friend’s navy apartment, food cooked by my matron of honor and me. I don’t yet know the toll being in Vietnam has taken but I will find out. I will lose the dream. But that’s all in my future. This night I dance.


married
Summer Killian

this is about a time when you rest your pretty head on someone else's sweatshirted chest and for a second, you don't know how old you are or what year it is — you don't need to know. you just know you love being right there, but — to be truthful, you forgot how it could feel — because it has been so long since it was just the two of you in a parking lot at dusk next to a field of dying sunflowers somebody planted by a deep, deep lake. cars are leaving, scattering pebbles as they pull out onto the highway, muffling the sounds of the crickets and the peepers only for a moment, and then you can hear it all again. there's a rhythm there, and some kind of message, too. so you stand there together, listening. are you smiling against each other's bowed heads now? maybe from a distance you look like those flowers, and you think to yourselves: we are married, we are married and it could be that you don't even know what that means, but now you are reminded of what it feels like.


maples
Theresa A. Cancro
 
I am six when I plant them, dozens of silver maple seeds in our garden out by the swing set. One by one, I create row upon row of plantings. I methodically insert my finger into the dirt. With gentle, circular motions, I widen the space and drop in a maple whirl-i-gig. I cover each seed with moist, pungent loam, a rich mixture of local soil and peat moss. Some of them grow, at first fragile and weak, but later they begin to sprout woody limbs. I water them daily after I get home from school. When we move to our new house, I make sure that Dad brings the saplings along. Mom and I have transferred them to small pots. We place them in boxes stacked against the back wall of the new porch. I ask Dad when we can plant them in the yard. He sets the pots out on the lawn, spacing them carefully, while I imagine shady spots. Miniature maples reach their branches to the sky. We plant one or two that day, the rest during long summer weekends.


mapquest
Tina Wright       
 
I like maps — for roads and highways, sure, but more maps of forests and parks. The Jenksville State Forest pamphlet map will never be in print again; some of my maps are scotch-taped. I once gave directions to hikers whose phones (with state forest trail maps) did not work in parts of Bear Swamp. Ah, but the Finger Lakes National Forest has brochure maps, lots, at many kiosks, so go Forest Rangers! I like maps. When people first used MapQuest to go places by car, it was pretty beta. Rural Moravia, where I grew up, has a tractor path called Church Road, a real road in the distant past, now a dirt track for tractors and jeeps, farmers’ pickups. MapQuest sent folks up and down that road, people heading to Moravia or Auburn. By tractor a zillion years ago, I had hauled hay down Church Road so it was funny to think of cars on that rocky steep tractor path (in winter? hahaha) but it is a good thing MapQuest finally rerouted the way. I’m not that mean.  


math
Tom Clausen

It started out so promising . . . I actually liked math at the outset. First there was addition. Simple adding numbers to other numbers. I was especially pleased with single digit numbers but became really impressed when I was able to do double and triple digits and carry over a number into the next column. Then came subtraction, again, a certain pride and confidence with the conquest of what was involved and I mostly could handle the taking away one number from another. I'll admit when division entered the picture there was concern, anxiety, and worry, but little by little with lots of error I began to sort of handle it. The same with multiplication. What came next, though, was way over my head which began to swim in the maze of numbers. There were bases, algebra, geometry, calculus and problem sets. It became clear I was out of my element with all the new-fangled math being presented. Taking math over in summer school didn't help but I got through it all somehow. To this day I cringe a bit at any hint of math beyond addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication. I still am happiest with single digit numbers; double digits are ok and I can accept triple digits. But let's stop right there!    


money
Zee Zahava

I was probably 10 or 11 when I started to receive an allowance from my parents. In the beginning it was small: 25 cents a week. It soon went up to 50 cents. Eventually, one whole dollar. I spent my allowance immediately. On junk. Candy from the corner shop; trinkets from John’s Bargain Store. When I was in high school I earned money by babysitting. No more candy or cheap doodads for me. I saved all my babysitting money and on Saturday mornings I’d take the D train down to Greenwich Village. So many places to buy the things I wanted most: books and records; wide embroidered ribbons to sew onto the hems of my jeans to make them longer, more bell-bottom-y; cotton head scarves that Mom called shmattas (rags). One day the hippie who worked in my favorite record store gave me a kazoo as a present. He said I looked like the kind of person who should go around playing a kazoo. So that’s what I did. Wherever I went. Me and my kazoo. It became my most precious possession. And it didn’t cost me a penny.