Category: memoir

• July 15, 2022

  The Last Witness

  There is a poem I love called The Last Uncle by Linda Pastan. It captures the feeling I had when my own last uncle died. My mother’s brother John was the last person I knew who had witnessed the Great Depression and WWII. Everyone who knew me as a child had now left the planet. […]
• October 19, 2021

  Carol Ann and the Lumberyard

  Today I started to write a post about my love of the smell of fresh lumber, but the words felt familiar. I looked up previous blogs and saw that I wrote about this same exact thing in May! Of this year! Covid brain? Maybe. But what about this: Coming out of the shower at my […]
• February 15, 2021

  Only You Can Tell Your Story

  The Covid 19 pandemic has changed lives all over the world, and we cope in different ways. Often, we look for distraction from it. But I’m a big believer in the saying, “The only way out is through.” The isolation, lack of hugs from best friends, missing restaurant meals and movie theaters, takes a toll […]
• March 27, 2019

  Near Miss

  One spring morning when I was four, I had a brush with death. My mother had just walked me and my little sister to “The Butcher’s,” a corner store two blocks from our house in Amsterdam, New York.  Its real name was Partyka’s Market, after the family who owned it, but we never called it […]
• December 29, 2018

  2019- Ready or Not!

  As the old year ends, I feel an urge to finish what I started, as if I need a clean slate to begin 2019. And then I laugh. As if that’s ever going to happen. Just last month, I stopped reading a book I hated. It was for my book club. Which I’m dropping out […]
• November 27, 2018

  Not About Gratitude

  My friend is 95. She is dear to me, a sweet woman who is frail but feisty. Can you be both? I think so. She is kind and hospitable when I come to call, and offers me food: an apple, an orange, a cup of tea. The feisty part comes out when she argues with […]
• October 26, 2018

  Boo! What Scares You?

   It’s almost Halloween, and in my corner of the world, you can take a haunted hayride, visit an abandoned penitentiary, or dress up like the walking dead. You can, not me. I don’t like to be scared. Come October, I’m all about comfort. Hot apple cider, knitting in my rocker while I watch the Hallmark […]
• September 25, 2018

  Dizzy Time

  It’s been one of those days. My usual treatment for benign positional vertigo doesn’t feel like it worked. I’ll give it 24 hours. The crystals in my inner ear have been slipping out of their little vestibule, off and on, for something like twenty years, and when they do, I get dizzy. Since I discovered […]
• July 25, 2018

  Big Girl Pants

  It was raining lightly when I got to the Borough Hall Station. I saw the sign on the street; all I needed was to find the entrance. People walked snappily by, like they knew where to go, and I wanted to look that way too. When I was young, New York City was my dream […]
• March 23, 2018

  Lipstick Print on a China Cup

  Photo by Pexels Coffee doesn’t like me anymore. It upsets my stomach. But whenever I see someone walking down a city street, lidded paper cup in hand, I want one. In my early 20’s, coffee and a cigarette started my day. On the way to work, I stopped in the lobby of the Erie County […]
• December 28, 2017

  The In Between Time

  This is the week in the year when I feel most in-between.  Thanksgiving and Christmas are over and a New Year waits in the wings. I feel like the director of a play in which I hold back the actors for just another moment. Not yet, it’s not quite time, we’re not ready, please wait. […]
• April 5, 2017

  When Things Were Not So Different

  We’ve been through tough times before. The world is like that.
• March 31, 2016

  One Thing At a Time

  Often, I find my mind spinning with ideas. I have a hard time deciding which one to focus on. Which writing project best deserves my attention? Which is a waste of time? I don’t know. I want to know. Ahead of time, before I even write it.
• March 22, 2014

  A Phone Call Brings a Nice Surprise

    Recently, my friend from kindergarten called. I hadn’t heard from her in several years, and we had a nice long chat, exchanging addresses, emails, cell numbers and news. Her name is in my memoir, Off Kilter, in the chapter about a field trip to the Shrine of Martyrs. As we talked on the phone, […]
• November 11, 2013

  A Veterans’ Day Salute

  My cousin Wayne rode into town with his mother on the Sunday afternoon train and arrived at Grandma’s house wrapped in a whiff of danger. My sister and I were good little girls who knew how to  behave. We sat on Grandma’s porch glider, careful to push off gently, toes to the floor, rocking slowly […]
• December 20, 2012

  Kat’s Tales – first in a series

  This is the first in a series of posts by Kat Kowalski, protagonist of my novel in progress, Memoirs of the Queen of Poland. Ever since I came back from the nineteenth century, I have wanted to tell my story. It’s taken me a few years to get it all down on paper. Life intervenes, […]
• June 7, 2011

  My Weekend as a Travel Guide

  This past weekend, I got to open a window and peek into other people’s lives. For the memoir workshop I taught at the Philadelphia Writers’ Conference, attendees submitted pieces a few weeks in advance for critique. And as always, the stories were heartfelt, moving and inspiring. A little black girl and her family traveled through […]
• August 2, 2008

  On Balance Again!

  The Epley Maneuver works! For me, anyway. My physical therapist repositioned the little rocks in my head, called otoconia, by taking me through a series of head turning positions. The first time made me very dizzy for about 15 seconds, then…I was cured! I have more exercises to improve my sense of balance, but I […]