Posts tagged "childhood/family"
Bad Girl

Bad Girl

I want to grow up and be good. I wake up, go to the gym, and eat breakfast, just like I’m supposed to. But I question things more than I should. I count the dresses mother has bought me, their number adding up to the number of things I can’t wait to throw away. I...
Into The Woods

Into The Woods

There were three of us—me, Jack, and Heddy—who always played in the woods. We were never inside unless we were in school. We stayed outside until our mothers called us for dinner. We called them our woods but really, they were just a strip of trees between our new subdivision and the only old farm...
Bird Strike

Bird Strike

It is a given that my son will be startled and come running when the blackbird hits the window of his bedroom with a forceful, insulated thud, and that following me downstairs, my son will jump and flap and spin on the back porch as I bend to examine the damage; finding a fledgling, stunned....
Lanier Drive

Lanier Drive

Summers in Atlanta, I almost never wore shoes. I’d go barefoot through the woods or pick my way down the rocky drive to the smooth asphalt on our street named for a poet—Sidney Lanier who praised the rivers coming down from the rocky crags in the mountains northeast of us—and I liked how tough my...
A Toddler Boy

A Toddler Boy

Your daddy had a dream, my mother tells me, about a toddler boy. A perfect mix of my eight-years-younger brother Joshua, my parents’ only son, and my sixteen-month-old Lydia, my parents’ only grandchild. The dream-toddler had Joshua’s eyes, Lydia’s cheeks and chin, both babies’ blond curly hair. We’re on the phone—me in Oklahoma, my mother...
I Am Not The One They Found in a Cornfield

I Am Not The One They Found in a Cornfield

It is foggy-wet and cold, a typical gray day in Ohio. I am standing above a rectangle of flat granite, thinking: they’ve put the wrong date. They’ve said Kelly died on September 25th, the day they found her. But I don’t mind. No one wants to hear an examiner’s speculation about such things, and I...
Raiment

Raiment

When my father stopped eating and we all understood it was a matter of time, I drove from Vermont to Boston to see him at the nursing home. He’d suffered a steady decline and lost the ability to care for himself, but his memory and cognitive abilities did not have the savage gaps of Alzheimer’s....
The Fair Kids

The Fair Kids

That’s what the teachers called them when they arrived at school every year in early October. Even though they looked worn-out in their faded, frayed clothes, I imagined their lives as worldly, exotic, roving from place to place, delivering three days of carnival razzle-dazzle to small towns like mine. I envied them because they never...
It’s About the Size of a Clenched Fist

It’s About the Size of a Clenched Fist

You probably don’t remember, but you were with me for my final hangover. You were just three and needed a flu shot. The revelry from the night before hung onto me, smothered me, made each movement a chore as we made our way to the doctor’s office. But I want you to know that although...
Running in Place

Running in Place

In the fourth grade I wanted to be good at the mile. I wanted to be faster than the fastest girl in my class: the girl with the doctor dad and the straight brown hair and tan thin legs. I would never be faster but my football coach dad took me to practice because that’s...
How Daylight Saving Ends

How Daylight Saving Ends

You died, my son exhales, a week before his fifth birthday and an hour before the clocks turn back, because a man in New Zealand wanted more sunshine—not time to be with his children, but to go bug-hunting after work. You keep dying, he repeats, every time I close my eyes. And he’s crying. Not...
Agostino Road

Agostino Road

I am sitting now on the warm sidewalk in front of our brown duplex surrounded by spikey balls dropped from the tree my mother calls our Liquidambar. My tree feels alive like a grandmother as it trembles its soft leafy hands, hands that shield my sidewalk from the hot sun. My memory begins here when...
Games

Games

My dad carries a trophy over the threshold and into our living room—a glinting gold whirly bug gleaming between two pillars. It shines the way I want to shine in his arms. My older sister and I inspect the inscription on the little plaque: 1985 Las Vegas Whirlyball Champion. Mom holds her wooden spoon in...
At Sea

At Sea

  He holds the rock in his hand, size of a grapefruit, color of an orange if the orange had been scuffed with sand. Rough and bumpy, surface flaking with dried mud, it glitters in the sun, and I think how when I was a boy I might’ve been scared, the idea of my dad...
The Crab Story

The Crab Story

  Nancy would tell me to write about the crab; the crab’s funny, it’s human, it’s real, not like the oxygen or the catheter or the morphine; the ugly accoutrements to death are too predictable, she’d say, no one wants to see that mess; maybe the crab story is the direction to take, the one...