Marie H Curran
I’m not sure where to begin. Ten years ago, or weeks ago.
Both were Januarys.
The January of ten years ago began with a head cold, and January 2022 began with a desire to avoid a head cold.
Ten years ago, when the then head cold rolled in and worsened, and I began struggling to stay awake at my accounting job, I ended up at my GP’s surgery. A place I wasn’t overly accustomed to. As one GP had said only weeks […]
Julie Wittes Schlack
A mobile in motion leaves an invisible wake behind it, or rather, each element leaves an individual wake behind its individual self … a slow, gentle impulse.
–Alexander Calder, 1973
Feet and knees aching like an old woman’s, I’m seated in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts exhibit titled “Hyman Bloom: Matters of Life and Death.” It’s my first visit since my mother died.
I’d come to see the photographs in the Howard Greenberg Collection, a stunning collection of 447 […]
Julia C. Spring
On Saturday mornings my big sisters and I would get as close as possible to our huge cabinet radio, so tall that only when we got to third grade could we see the words in Webster’s Unabridged International Dictionary, Second Edition, splayed open on its top. Our beloved ritual was listening to “Let’s Pretend”—at 9 a.m. when we lived near Boston in the late 1940’s and at noon after we moved to Seattle in 1950, due to the time difference between the two coasts.
Cast members’ […]
James Macdonald
I’m being driven in a white van. It’s 4:45 a.m. on my first day of shooting a low- budget remake of the iconic horror film Chainsaw Massacre. Outside my window the Red River appears and disappears as the pink Louisiana dawn creeps over the dash. I close my eyes, lean my head against the cool, foggy glass, and pretend to sleep. My driver chews sunflower seeds and spits the shells into a Styrofoam cup. He asks if the radio is too loud, which it […]
Traci Elliott
We lived in a duplex on Ashley Circle, in the not-quite-as-nice neighborhood then, Mama managing the trailers up the road. I walked past the circle of them on my way to the bus stop every morning, the cache of less-than-we-were tucked in behind the pine trees. In the summertime, my sister rode her Big Wheel in our driveway, pulling the emergency brake, fishtailing, gravel arching into the air, heat shimmying over the asphalt. We spent some weekends with Daddy at his second wife’s house, with the pool table in […]
Jenna Klobucher
I come from a simple family—we sing in deafening harmony on road trips, we take too many photos at unremarkable events (lunch at McDonald’s, second and third days of kindergarten). So for a long time, nobody could make sense of my sister’s outbursts. She cried at school, she cried at the beach, she cried even when we got a new puppy. Her raw, red eyes emptied uncharted distress and she recoiled bitterly at any semblance of joy. These tormented sobs racked her scrawny bones for a while as my parents […]
Ash Taylor
I remember when the great oak tree on my elementary school campus was felled. The district said the tree was diseased, that it was rotting at the root, and they brought in monstrous yellow machinery to remedy the situation. First, they cut away all of the naked branches, then they ripped the trunk straight out of the ground, leaving nothing but a patch of dust behind. I was eight, and the loss of that tree was the biggest tragedy I could imagine.
I remember, a week before, I sat […]
Anu Pohani
The 1980s
Our flight lands at JFK at 3 p.m. It takes us a few hours to get all our luggage, load up and truck across the two bridges home. “I hope there’s no traffic on the Tri-boro,” Dad says to no one in particular. We eat the snacks in Mom’s handbag, reserved for emergencies. Still hungry, we start to bicker. There is always traffic on the Tri-Boro Bridge on the Cross Bronx Expressway. Typically, the George Washington Bridge entrance is where things clear up.
When we […]
Don Noel
One of my favorite photos is of our year-old daughter, looking over her shoulder from a foot-high galvanized tub on a bare cement floor, waiting to be bathed. It is the summer of 1959; we are pinched into the concrete-block toolshed I’d built a year earlier for practice. It has become our home while I labor to get our new house roofed, enclosed, and heated before autumn cold makes the toolshed intolerable. I work longer hours every evening than I do at my job.
I smile […]
Elizabeth Jaeger
I am trying desperately to pretend that today is not Ash Wednesday, but I have not been very successful. There was a time I looked forward to Lent. True, it’s been years since I went to service to get ashes—at best, I’m a lapsed Christian. When my son was younger, I made an effort to bring him to church. For several years, I was good about it. But then after one summer, it was too hard to go back. Being active in church required me to be social, […]
