family

I wonder if there is an afterlife.  Nancy believed in it, but she doesn’t seem to be cooperating.  My friend Carrie tells me her dead partner Judy moved a chair…

This is how one story goes: My PopPop’s PopPop and his family fled Romania sometime in the decades leading up to the holocaust, leaving behind land and family and lives…

On Route 17M, heading toward New Jersey for Aunt Mary’s wake, my father asks me to keep an eye on the pond at the Goshen exit. At 70 mph, I…

* * * And I wish for a moment, a moment to breathe. There is my teenage son, his knee bouncing under the kitchen table; my father, calling voicelessly for…

When I make bread, I focus on the feel of the dough, the windowpane test for gluten elasticity, the delicate question of adding a pinch of flour. Will it turn…

I knew it was a long shot, but I had to do it. It was now or never. I promised Joe, my agent of thirty years, two weeks. “Two weeks!”…

Sifting under strawberry vines each week, I lift their long, leafy tendrils with god knows what on the end. Various shapes, colors, and stages of rottenness, or not. I’d planted…

Lessons I’ve Learned From a Woodpecker: Save your brain Get to work Be loving Be free I had a few concussions when I was younger. I feel like we are…

* * * my sixteenth year spreads itself between steam flooding under a locked door & my mother knocking softly. a juicy lucy burger waits in my stomach & i’m…

Image Credit: Engin Akyurt from Pexels   Entangled in sleep, Omar lay across the porch in front of the door like a sack of laundry. I nudged him softly with…

I never knew my lola. Every few months, I would hear her voice crackle through the phone from the other side of the Earth.  On the mantel, I would see…

I.   They had all disappeared before I arrived. Death. Distance. Disconnection. And discontent. Mother said her mum jubilated when she conceived me. But earth had taken her in, folding…

Dear Uncle R., Here’s what the stories have told me: you died in 1987 at home, not in Vietnam. I was born in 1990. My coworker—an army reserve who saw…

My grandmother died the day I went to the dentist. My dad called me right as I was putting on some coffee. In three days, I was sitting in an…