Tag: society
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December Dreaming
I juggled a salted caramel latte with my purse and bag of drugstore sundries as I opened my door. Inhaling the warm comforting aroma of my coffee, an old man’s voice came back to me. “My son said to get a lah-tayyyy,” he said, drawing the word out with a little smile. He was amused […]
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Election Time. Who Cares?
Around this time of year, when I was quite young, a car rolled slowly past our house with big round “loudspeakers” fastened to the roof, from which blared the voice of a man telling us who to vote for, a voice I heard even after the car rounded the corner and moved down the next […]
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It’s Touching
Yesterday, a woman I know only slightly rubbed my arm. “I like to touch people,” she said. “It’s good for us.” She happens to be a very sweet, kind person whom I like, so I didn’t mind. We had a little exchange about how we felt we had to do air hugs at the beginning […]
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Code Blue Valentine
One day last week, I drove a friend to her doctor’s appointment. The temperature on my car thermometer read 42 in the garage and dropped ten degrees before I was even out of our street. Going up the highway, the numbers went down…32, 28, 20, 19. Stopping at the library to drop off two books, […]
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Writer’s Tears
We chose the Monday after Thanksgiving to visit the light display at Peddler’s Village, a quaint shopping district in the country about 20 minutes from home. Every year, thousands (millions?) of colored lights sparkle from trees, around the doors and eaves and roofs of shops, spinning around a working water wheel and forming an arched […]
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Good Enough is good enough
Do you ever feel like quitting? Whether it’s learning to cook a fancy meal, brewing the perfect cup of tea, promoting a project, or maintaining a friendship, many things we value take work, and it’s not always rewarded as quickly as we’d like. When I was starting out as a writer, I read craft articles […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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The Comfort of Words
I read today that Joyce Carol Oates describes sitting down at her writing desk as “low dread.” Hmmm. Just how I see America today: “low dread.” What new horror will our president and his enablers bring upon us? Crying children torn from their parents, closing the door on immigrants because of their country’s majority religion, […]
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The Space Between Stories
I’ve heard that writers write to make sense of the world. That’s certainly been true for me. And yet, the world seems to have become even less understandable over my lifetime. Aren’t we supposed to become wiser with age? What is the reason for the interpersonal division in our country? We seem to be on […]
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The Not To Do List
Image by Pexels.com It’s the end of January, and according to businessinsider.com, 80% of New Year’s resolutions have been broken. I’m no longer a “business insider,” if I ever was, having left the corporate world 27 years ago, nor did I make any New Year’s resolutions. But like most people, I have lists of things […]
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That Wall
“I want that wall,” she says, and my back arches like a cat’s. I know exactly what she is talking about, and it’s not a Pink Floyd album. A leading Presidential candidate wants to erect a wall to keep out immigrants and my petite blond massage therapist likes the idea. She leads the now […]
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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, […]