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Writer’s Block
When friends and acquaintances ask what I’ll be doing when I retire, I almost apologetically say, “Writing.” I then add, “And hiking, taking care of my husband with Alzheimer’s, and traveling between our two boys in Minnesota and Missouri. I say almost apologetically, because “writing” doesn’t seem to satisfy some people’s need for me to stay busy. I’ve even had a few to offer for me to volunteer in areas they have interest in. I’m not looking for things to fill my time. Writing can be a full-time job. Just because a short story takes five minutes to read, it doesn’t mean it takes five minutes to write. Writers agonize…
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Accumulation of Ridiculousness
It seems like yesterday, I was planning my first career: I’m in the bathtub rolling from back to belly and back again; water is up to my chin. With each roll, the water splashes as far up the side of the tub as it can, without spilling over onto the floor. I crawl backward as far as I can, scrunch my long legs up, then push forward, going the entire length of the tub back and forth in rapid succession, until finally forcing water up the walls and onto the rug. My little sister is being dried off because I can’t do the routine with both of us still in…
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Full Moon
Yesterday was one heck of a day. Actually, when I came through the door at home and my husband asked how my school day was, I forcefully threw my things down. “It was one helluva day.” “Helluva good day or helluva bad day?” “Not good. It was weird.” I don’t know how much of my story he followed, because I saw him looking around me at an old movie on TV, but I told him about a disrespectful student before lunch and two students I thought were going to come across my desk and throw punches at each other after lunch. I already believed it must be a full moon…
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Tornado Alarm
The blasting siren traveled to my six year-old ears, reverberating in every direction inside my skull. Maggie looked to the sky, pulling a Pall Mall out of the tanned, ancient folds protecting her toothless gums and declared, “There’s a tornado com’n!” Terror filled me. I ran in high gear, next door to my two-story red sandpaper-sided house and straight to my personal fallout shelter. Sitting on bathroom scales stuffed between the pipes of our small sink and stained bathtub, I clasped my ears and sobbed, knowing I would be blown to bits. I was a dramatic child. Like “the chicken or the egg” question, I’m not sure which came first:…
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Mrs. Sharon
As I begin my last year of teaching, I am looking back on the last 25 years I have spent in the same district from which I graduated high school. There is one person I wish I could have shared the entire time with, but she is not far from my thoughts. My junior high reading teacher was one of the best teachers I ever had. I was scared to death of her those two years, though, because Mrs. Sharon demanded respect and didn’t take any bull off anyone, as she taught in what I thought was a most unconventional manner. It was really exciting to have a teacher work hard…
