• Search History: Confronting My Online Stalker

    Search History: Confronting My Online Stalker

    This is the most dangerous story I have ever written, so if the account should disappear, it is surely because of Stalker. Indeed, my lot will be a pillar of salt if I even dare to catch Stalker’s gaze, so I have recommitted myself this year to looking away for good. Because light takes time…

  • Dear F_____: I regret to inform you

    In my basement in a plastic storage container there rests a set of beloved pictures, most still framed in bamboo 18 years after I created them. Even though I used cheap glue sticks to adhere the dried grass plant to the corners and sides of the art, they peek at me intact, staring back from…

  • Witnessing

    For My Father Charley, a Promise Kept This is my season of witnessing. Only months before my father died in Spring 2020, he was confronted by close family members in his house, a place he and my mother purchased as their retirement home, too large for a couple, but not quite large enough for their…

  • The Puritan Crier

    When you wrote in a letter to my husbandthat our first child was a “blessing in disguise,”I walked miles through my neighborhoodpushing him in his strolleruntil the soles of my feetslapped the question on pavement:“In disguise of what?” He had copper curls spillingover widely spaced blue eyes now grown green like my father’s.A single gene changed…

  • Semiotics: Why I Went to the Wrong College and Stayed

    In the summer of 1989, approximately six months after Pam Am Flight 103 exploded from a terrorist’s bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland, with 270 people perishing—including 35 college students who were traveling home from studying abroad—my frightened parents hugged and kissed me goodbye in the parking lot of Juniata College, knowing that within a week I…

  • A Death in My Family

    For the first year after my oldest brother died by suicide, my mother said that he visited her almost every night and rocked her gently in a state she described as in between wakefulness and sleep. “Charley,” she would say to my father who was lying in bed next to her, “Chuck is here. He…