I want you to know how incredible, resilient, smart, funny, kind, and brave one of my current college essay students is. I want you to know because she is otherwise invisible. She, like many others, is low-income. During the pandemic, her mother, a waitress, lost her $3 an hour job…

The narrow road to Ender’s Island twists and turns, weaving in and among trees at times as well as glacial grey boulders ranging in size from bowling ball to consuming the entire front lawn. Along the way are multiple speed bumps, and a speed limit of 20 mph, as if…

I don’t want to write about this, about how we had to install an additional air conditioner in my dad’s bedroom while he was dying because his body was working so hard to stay alive that he was overheating all the time. Or about how accurate the hospice brochure was…

Dear Ohio, Louise Hay says that aches in the body are a sign of longing to be loved and held. Today, my left upper arm feels like a swollen immovable boulder. House Moderna says nah, it’s just the immune system. Potato, potahto. What I know is this. I wrote you…

I knew it was a mistake as I rode up the elevator. Upon entering, I plastered myself against its back wall as if to shore up my strength and immediately felt my hands and jaw clench. My body was taking a stance I had rarely felt before. Sheer terror. …

What could have been, should have been a typical courtship of a series of texts followed by a phone call or two and then a date, something like lunch or dinner and a movie and mini-golf, was instead his mom dying of Alzheimer’s, my mom and her Alzheimer’s, Covid, and…

“Do my feet smell like popcorn?” I recognized this ask was clearly above and beyond my assistant’s job description and might even be some as yet unnamed form of harassment but I needed to know. It was a little after 8:30 in the morning and the two of us sat…

I am driving home on Route 1, a two-lane road which goes from 35 mph closer to town to 55 mph along the more residential section. Between here and home are three traffic lights. If I can just get to and through them, I could be home in three minutes…

Surrounding me on all sides is mountain laurel, its signature wavy trunk and branches filling the woods in every direction, an astonishing sight. I’ve never seen so much in one great expanse. Traveling through that understory greatly tempts but I resist. …