I didn’t want to fight her. But here we stood, facing off in the bluffs behind our houses, the dirt pocked with tracks where after dark older teens spun brodies and rolled their cars trying to climb the sheer canyon wall. Back here, behind neat rows of split-level homes and manicured lawns, where the gentle slopes of the streets gave… Read more →
I was thirty when my father, Jerry, died in McKinleyville, California. The last time I saw him, I held his shrunken body upright from behind while he urinated, my arms wrapped around his chest. It was like hugging a bag of wheezing, cancer-ridden feathers. It was the first time Jerry didn’t smell like cigarettes. He pissed in… Read more →
That summer, my younger brother and I biked a mile from our house to the railroad tracks every day, where we’d built a hidden fort between the boulders and slabs of rock, making a roof out of leafy branches. Only two boys in the neighborhood knew about our secret refuge, and the four of us squeezed into our cramped quarters,… Read more →
I recognized the speaker at the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, a man wearing a motorcycle jacket and a bandana. The memory has mostly faded, but I can still see him standing in that jacket, his hands pressing his sides from inside those pockets. My friend Michelle and I sat on folding chairs behind other people in that shadowy room. Motorcycle Jacket… Read more →
“We do not take a trip; a trip takes us.”–John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley I know the Montana sky. A cyanic canopy stretching beyond beyond. Open country. I’ve been lost and found beneath that sky. I’ve slept under it, made love under it, rode horseback under it, cooked campfire steak under it, but I’m always overwhelmed by it. That sky… Read more →
I learn the blueberries I am eating this morning were flown in from Chile. They have a dusting of white on them and are firm, some with little nubs of green where they’ve been picked by someone I will never meet. Their origin is found on the container, but also in the article I have read about other fruits from… Read more →
When my mother was a girl during the Depression, the circus rolled into her prairie town on slow trains, then set up on the fairgrounds at the edge of town. She loved the big tent, the smell of sawdust. My circus? At the cement civic center downtown. I was not captivated by the clown cars, the balloons, the woman riding… Read more →
Excerpted from Fighting Pollution and Climate Change: An EPA Veteran’s Guide How to Join in Saving our Life on Planet Earth, by Richard W. Emory, Jr. www.fightingpollutionbook.com, BookLocker Publishing, August 2020. At the sounding of the horn, some women—permanent residents of our little town—grabbed their sharpest knives and rushed out their front doors. In the street, they were joined by… Read more →
We lock every window and door, a futile effort to keep our children safe from hazed atmosphere. But I do not want to talk about the air or how much my eyelids itch. Instead, I have chosen to fall in love with your wrist and relish in the way it bends as you chop an onion, how you cradle the… Read more →
i. My harp Check it out. Ten holes, steel cover plate, wooden comb, brass reeds hidden within the holes. Engraved onto the top of the cover plate is a Victorian-style portrait, a man’s profile, high collar, sideburns down to his jawline, surrounded by a garland of flowers, and the words Marine Band, M. Hohner. It fits in the palm of… Read more →