The Snake in the John
It was spring of 1982 and I was married to Jason. He and I and our two children, Brian and Zoey–both barely teenagers–were living in an old, small 3-bedroom house across the creek deep in the country on the edge of an apricot orchard. We had already lived through a number of adventures while living [...]
To all my subscribers
I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season. I’ve not posted in a while because of surgery on my foot and the loss of my best friend and niece, Linda, to cancer. She was two years older than I am and we were just like sisters and very close. I take comfort in knowing [...]
Sleeping on Orange Juice Cans
It was 1965, and I was fifteen and a sophomore at Calaveras High School in San Andreas, California. I was living with my sister and brother-in-law in Burson at the time when my niece, Patty, and I decided to try out the new craze making its way around the school. It seemed that all the [...]
Dear Sir,
I know that we’ve never met, but I believe that I’m your daughter. I’m not sure whether you know I’m alive or have looked for me, but I have looked for you. After you left us on the day I was born in January of 1950, my mother took a job driving a truck in [...]
Living With Chronic Pain
As I drifted out of my self-induced haze and near-death experience, choking and vomiting up charcoal, the doctor asked me unsympathetically, “So you want to commit suicide, do you?” I never saw him again, or I would have gladly answered his question. That was July 4, 2002. I had taken a partial bottle of Tylenol [...]
The Dungeon of Hope
I wasn’t sure what to expect as I rode in the back of a police cruiser late New Year’s Eve, en-route to the Holland Rescue Mission. Having never had this experience before, I imagined a bleak, dank, dimly lit dungeon with rows of cots filling large musty rooms. I arrived at the mission early New [...]
The Drive In
October 5, 2008 started out as a peaceful Sunday evening, which would turn into one of the most terrifying of our lives. Amid the financial crises and the stock market crashes, we would endure a crash of our own. It was about 5:15 p.m. when our world exploded. My roommate, Jade, was just waking up [...]
Daddy
Daddy was born in 1867 somewhere in Scotland and only two years after President Lincoln was assassinated. My mother married him when I was nine months old and he was eighty-three. Daddy stood about five foot eight, was slightly stocky but very spry, always wore long-sleeved shirts with suspenders, and had twinkling blue eyes and [...]
The Bubble Bath
It was one of the most memorable and romantic experiences of my life, and it involved a horse trough, a wood fire, and a bubble bath. It was 1986, and I was married to Jason at the time. We were living in a 14′ x 70′ mobile home on ten acres of land 7,000 feet [...]
The Cuff Button
It was a Saturday night in 1971. The band was well known in the area, and the dimly-lit bar of the local bowling alley was filled to capacity as the musicians played one of the more popular dance songs of the month. It had a beat that neither my boyfriend, Dean, nor I could resist, [...]
