ONE with the Truth

flash fiction, rocking chairIt’s taken me 89 years, two months, and 26 days to figure it out.

But Lord help me, I have figured out what no one told me all these living days.

I don’t blame the people in my early life. My grandmother’s folk (she had 14 siblings) spent their lives just surviving. The earlier generations didn’t have time to figure out what was real, because life was just too damned hard.

But we technocratic, soft-skinned, thin-skinned spoiled people of the 21st century – we have no excuse. We have toilets and warm showers and grocery stores packed with food. We have vehicles of all sizes and shapes to transport us anywhere; free education from 5 to 18 years; easy chairs to sit in and stare into our gas fireplaces just to ponder. No need to chop our wood and cook our meat on that fire. We just use it to warm our souls and ponder. Yes, to just think.

Not that thinking helped me figure it out. The opposite, really. Continue reading

Canned Love

canned goods, love storyAs I placed my head on the pillow to sleep, I suddenly thought about Artie. My heart choked up as if something was squeezing it, hard.

The pain pushed the blood, salt, and tears out of my soul.

I rose out of bed, realizing that sleep was impossible, and walked quietly, almost hypnotically, over to the master bath. What I needed was a good long soak in the tub . . . Continue reading

EavesDRIPPING

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

I’m a writer, so I love to eavesdrop. In fact, I encourage my creative writing students to listen to conversations unobtrusively and often.

But I do wonder what listening to someone else’s discussion has to do with an eave (the edge of a roof that overhangs the side of a building) dropping. So, as a writer/researcher, I look up the origins of the word. Continue reading