Midwestern Mama Cooking up Life in the Heartland
You smile expectantly at me, but the silence is as awkward as a blindfolded giraffe figure skating. “Uh… wow…” I stammer. “Thanks?” I don’t really know what to say because what you’ve told me makes me uncomfortable, like an itchy tag in a shirt or when you have to sit in a child-sized chair for … Read more
A sumptuously thick chenille scarf of silence wraps my head as the light fades and night settles on the mountain. The blanketing snow will come soon, shrinking my simple world. I welcome the stillness one glowing candle at a time.
126, waking. The skin on my thumb is too tough, so I never stick my thumb. I haven’t the heart to use my pinky – it looks far too much like a child for me to sacrifice it. The one time I used my index finger, a bruise bloomed before I lifted the lancet. So … Read more
Nighttime grass tickles my toes. The earth thrums alive, magnetically pulsing, breathing. A dragonfly hovers, its silhouette obscuring unnamed constellations, electric wings bending starlight. I reach up toward the moon, sure my hungry fingers will tease ancient dust from her cratered surface.
The Tooth Fairy visited our house last night to retrieve the tiniest tooth ever plucked from a five-year-old’s wee mouth. There was much joy and celebration for this bizarre custom of worshipping milk teeth. Violet regaled the twins with tales of a friend whose tooth was whisked away by a Tooth Fairy so delicate and … Read more
It is a victory. A small house, a cottage with bluish-green or greenish-blue paint rests on a corner in my town. It belonged to someone else and someone else before that, but now it belongs to me. The wood floors are warm, the plaster walls are solid. The windows open to let birdsong and breeze … Read more
I’m not a terribly nostalgic person. I’m the last person who would choose to watch a tear-jerker as I find them manipulative. I don’t feel the need to hold on to remnants of my childhood or mementos of lives I’m no longer living. But my 20th wedding anniversary would have been next Wednesday. The tense … Read more
“I really want to kiss you.” he said, leaning far away from me in the front seat of his car. I echoed his pose, my shoulder pressed into the fogged passenger window. He’d just given weight and an identity to the mounting tension sitting in the canyon between us. Our good-natured sparring in aikido practice … Read more
We all stood there dumbfounded. “Well?” demanded Dr. Roberts. Rachael stammered, “It’s possible I misread your handwriting.” “I could have put the vial on the wrong shelf,” offered Micah. “Maybe,” I said flatly, “or maybe I just didn’t give a flying fuck.”
It has snowed in my neighborhood all day. Sleet, wind, snow. And now the snowblowers are growling, eating away the white, churning it into cragged piles of chunked snow. I hear them move forward and backward, erasing the snow from driveways and sidewalks. You might not have noticed, but my digs have changed. Somehow in … Read more