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Aging
The Dog-Eared Page
20, 40, 60, 80
Middle-aged people shrink, crease, fade, and, if they’re lucky, slowly lose the desire to be noticed, the way we once lost our childhood taste for Necco Wafers or Pez. My desire to be seen is gradually being replaced by the desire to see: the faces of those I love, the cardinal in the bush, the socks of the woman with multiple sclerosis who swims at the Y.
December 2023
Poetry
Five Months After My First Husband’s Death
My son posts a picture of himself at three years old / with his father, my first husband, / who still has black curly hair and is looking right out of the photograph / at me, as if he knew this day would come, me staring back / at him and wondering where that moment has gone.
November 2022Poetry
At Sixty-Five
This morning I fell back / into deep snow / and dug myself into a snow angel. / Yeah. I didn’t tell anyone. I mean, / c’mon, right?
July 2022Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
My Fight Against Time
The desire to hang on to youth for as long as one could — to see that as greed was new to me, and the idea had deep implications for how I saw myself.
July 2022
The Dog-Eared Page
Four Poems From Ancient China
Call next door, ask / neighbors on the west if they can spare / any wine, and suddenly a jarful comes / across the fence — fresh, unfiltered. We / open mats beside Meandering River’s / long currents, crystalline winds arrive, / and you’re startled it’s already autumn.
July 2022
Poetry
Love In Our Seventies
We don’t take each other for granted, because we know we’re old. Sometimes when we’re bird-watching — field guides, binoculars — happy to be looking at egrets or green-winged teal, I think, One of us is going to die first.
July 2022Photography
A Thousand Words
A Thousand Words features photography so rich with narrative that it tells a story all on its own.
July 2022
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Evanescence
Everything new disappears, within and without. Alzheimer’s disease is eroding her hippocampus. . . . She has what the neurologist calls “rapid forgetting,” so she lives in a state of evanescence; nothing holds.
April 2022
Essays, Memoirs & True Stories
Winter Of Flying Walruses
I should have seen the breakup coming. After just a few months with Shaye I was frightened by her inability to make concrete plans for the future. She was like an iceberg: pretty from far off, but scary the closer you got.
February 2022
Quotations
Sunbeams
February 2022A memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth, but not its twin.
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