When I was eleven, a chicken farmer in our small town claimed he’d been visited by extraterrestrials. Through pantomime they asked for water and in return gifted him with three burned pancakes, one of...

I went to a quilt show yesterday. It was an absolutely beautiful display of quilts in all colors and sizes — some completed with great expertise, some by slightly less accomplished quilters. Several were...

During the Cold War in the 1960’s, it was trendy to have a bomb shelter.  Or at least so we were led to believe by the family who built one in the small town...

I spent last weekend in a bodywork class.  It was an incredibly fun class, full of good information delivered by the most entertaining instructor I’ve encountered in maybe my whole life.  There were about...

I grew up in a town of a only a thousand people. One main street, two blocks long, the usual shops — and being a resort area, an assortment of stores that we called...

We have an electric toothbrush with an expectation of two minutes of brushing time.  When we use it we say we are “going under the brush”.  I think the two minutes are probably typical...

In my language class we have names that correspond to Spanish ones.  I easily segued to Maria.  Vincent was for those two hours Vincente, Bill became Guillermo, Connie was Constanza and so on.  An...

Years ago when our children were very young, we had an activist friend who visited often.  He liked to amuse himself by having our kids march around the room, pumping their little fists in...

I was bored yesterday. I wanted to DO something. “You can do lots of things,” my husband informed me. “You can read or write or sew or cook or work outside, you can go...

There was a young woman I knew a long time ago. She had lank brown hair, her clothes were misshapen and out of style.  Her mother was dead, her father a loner who ran...