I seize the opportunity to use my new earbuds, a gift to myself last December that I still hadn’t figured out how to use. Not sure why I had felt such a need to buy them except for the fact that I watched my two grandchildren – 11 and 12 – walk around their house smiling as they listened to a book (or music?) with small white objects stuck in their ears. Continue reading
non-fiction
You’re Not Going to Believe This
In Section II, Fun Family Drama
No, you may not believe that I – a writer, an author, a consummate reader – rarely (as in hardly ever) read the reviews of my books. How gauche. How extremely weird. Or, you may say, how cowardly.
But when I wrote Flashes of Life (my latest, now a little over a year old) it was nearest and dearest to my writing heart because it’s …. memoir. Fortunately for my readers, it’s flash memoir, which means you can sit outside on the front porch in your rocking chair, and within five sips of your iced tea (or Diet Coke, or lemonade, or beer if it’s almost sunset) you’ll have finished one of my stories in this flash(y) compilation of my life’s anecdotes. 
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The Early Appointment
I asked for an early appointment, but not too early. I wanted the doctor to be fresh, but not still yawning from his night’s sleep. I wanted the nurse to still be enthusiastic about the patient, not looking at her watch to see how long before lunch, or before she got to escape home, take off her scrubs, and pull on her shorts and t-shirt.
“9:30,” the scheduler suggested, and I grabbed it like a life preserver in the ocean. Everything will be easy because I got the perfect time. 
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A Donut Vacation
I remember the trip to the mountain more than the mountain itself.
Once a year, my brother and I are awakened at the ungodly hour of 5 a.m. We stumble in the back seat of the 4-door Pontiac with pillows and blanket and sleep off and on for the next two and a half hours. But I only doze. The excitement of what is ahead is too stimulating for sleep. Continue reading
The Rewards of a Simple Life
We are quite inconvenienced by a bird.
And we’re learning to let her have her way with us. Continue reading
roughwighting 