As it happened, the first Sunday that we were able to be properly dressed for church was Easter Sunday. Easter meant nothing to me except that Grandmother had to have a corsage to be properly dressed, and we had to leave early to find an open flower shop. Pop drove us to the front of […]
A Student–Tutor Dialogue Teach Me Student: This beautiful sentence by John Steinbeck still captivates me fifteen years after I first read it: “At about ten o’clock in the morning, the sun threw a bright dust-laden bar through one of the side windows, and in and out of the beam, flies shot like rushing stars.” We
It was 1945; I was three years old. I wanted to go to church. I told Grandmother. She was reluctant. Why did I want to go? We weren’t church going people. I’d heard of it, I told her, and I wanted to go. I wanted to go for several weeks and eventually Grandmother told me
A Student–Tutor Dialogue Student: What do you think of this story? I know it lacks something, but I don’t know what. Appearance as Metaphor Tutor: You need to love your characters. There is a convention in fiction that uses the features of a person as metaphors for character. Close-set eyes mean a person may be
A source of joy in my life has always been the ability to give people gifts. Early on I discovered that the kind of gifts that bring the most joy to me are the gifts of myself. So I have crafted things, or spent hours, weeks, and months shopping for rare items I knew someone
Grandmother sewed. When she earned her first money at age twelve, after quitting school so she could work, she bought some black silk and made a dress for her mother. She told me she had done a terrible job on it, but her mother wore it proudly anyway. Grandmother took any job she could get,
I had lived in this body for a year and a half when everything changed. By then I could speak in complete and grammatical sentences with proper pronunciation and inflection. I could stand but not crawl or walk. My father was practically unknown to me, a shadowy figure to fear, but Mother taught me and
At first, it was the light bulb. It glared into my eyes from the center of the ceiling all evening as I lay in my crib. I was alone. Once, when I had been at a grocery store in my stroller, I had heard my mother explain to someone that I was being raised very
My kitchen area has no circulation, is humid, hot, and stifling. Sweat drips off my nose as I finish making a cup of iced coffee in the morning. Coffee in hand, I take my dog for his morning constitutional, a leisurely stroll in the sunshine around the block; he sniffs each familiar leaf and glares
In 2021, I knew I had to move, had known it for five or six years, but the pressure was becoming urgent; the Washington state apartment where I lived was no longer the right place for me. I loved where I lived and found it convenient to everything. It was beautiful and comfortable, and increasingly
