Open Doors
The winter I was seventeen, I visited my once raucous Mennonite playmate whose ill health had transformed into a soft-spoken friend. The whites of her deep brown eyes had yellowed from the severe complications of her liver. Her family and
The Other Half of Me
Every day at eleven the elderly couple would sit at the rectangular table in the center of the square room that faced the restaurant kitchen. Within two weeks of my eighteenth summer I could put their order in the kitchen without bothering
Room to Grow
Yesterday I knelt on the stamped concrete porch and yanked a ponytail tree out of a red ceramic pot, and as clods of dirt fell from the tangled roots onto my pants, I was hit with a revelation that was so simple
Growing Up
Seventeen years ago I requested a white Persian kitten for Christmas, but my father’s storage barn business was slow as it usually was over winter so instead I received an orange and white long-haired tom that hissed and clawed until