I remember as a small child visiting my maternal great-grandmother Minnie at a nursing home and being frightened to give her a kiss because of all the stiff hairs she had on her chin. She was missing part of one leg due to diabetes and was bedridden. In my young…

For most of my childhood, a great deal of our belongings stayed packed away in cardboard boxes from grocery and liquor stores, labeled with the room from which the contents originated at some point in the past. There was little point to unpacking. …

We wake up in the dark now. And even when we leave our home in the mornings, the light is still dim and so we have to turn our headlights on in order to see into the long shadows left behind as the world slowly lights up. It is rutting…

I maneuvered my way through our wild yard overgrown with shoots of goldenrod that are at their peak, in search of pollinators to watch hard at work, when I came across a bee that looked as if it was struggling to free itself from a flower. I watched it for…

In the grips of a strong asthma attack, a pain centered just below my right shoulder blade causes each breath to feel as if the back of my right lung is being pulled inward and a heavy weight crushes my chest, and without thinking I meter the times between each…

A couple of months ago, I injured my right leg while clumsily stepping up onto our treadmill, a fancy manual treadmill we purchased at the beginning of the pandemic and whose deck stands taller than typical electric treadmills. As I stepped onto the treadmill with my right foot too close…

I grew up without my father in my life. As a child, I had little understanding of why he chose to not be a part of my life. While I did not think that it was my fault that he made this decision, I could not fathom why a parent…

We are surrounded by an unfathomable vastness whose entirety is incomprehensible to the limits of our intelligence and to the brief time we are here to try to make sense of it all. And so we do our best to understand what is in front of us, what surrounds our…

Or, How We’d All Be Dead if My Father Kept a Spare A tribute to Kurt Vonnegut that I wrote while a student in a literary fiction program many years ago. While my classmates did their best to emulate Hemingway or Faulkner, I went with an author that could tell…