I got my first gerbil at age 10. They were exotic pets at the time, living primarily in the deserts of Asia. Where many school friends had hamsters, animals that are nocturnal, gerbils are daylight creatures. They are brown, fur covered, mouse-like rodents — but cuter — with long tails. When handling gerbils, you can harmlessly lift them by the base of their tail. I don’t remember from where we got him, but George came home for my birthday.
That summer I went to sleep away camp for the first time. During the month of July in 1969, I was at Camp Abelard in Upstate New York. Its predecessor was called Webatuck. A percentage of campers and staff that had been family at the abandoned grounds returned to what would now be called Abelard.…
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Death is my business, my bread and butter. So, you’d think, on my day off, I’d want to shut the door on it. But, I can’t help myself. I’m drawn to those newspaper articles. You know, those stories, hidden away amongst life’s trivia, about some poor soul who’s just been given the worst news imaginable; they’re dying. Devastating news for them and their loved ones but, newsworthy? Really?
As depressing as it is, a story about death and dying is compelling. I can’t stop myself. I read it. Diagnosed with some cruel illness which is slowly killing them, the person with the death sentence is quoted as saying, ‘I’m going to use the time I have left to make memories.’ They feel the urge to leave lingering proof that they were physically here.…
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Before the men came through and struck her bald, my mother said, the mountain had been verdant. Green snakes had capered in shadows beneath great green oaks, beetles had squirmed in the wet cavities of overturned rocks. My mother said that there had been whitetail deer that had drunk from streams, that there had been bears in summer and coyotes in spring and turkeys in autumn. My mother told me that this had once been a land alive.
I do not know how true her stories were.
All I know is what I see when I crest the hill, through the arch of two great tree branches that have long been stripped of their leaves and their bark.
And what I see is thus:
Sitting alone atop a hill, behind a house that has raised generations, is the bald and sandy face of a carved-out mountain top.…
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It was a bitter cold night in March 2015 when a certain sage-grouse female’s (SGF) life changed forever. That night she was designated “SGF4601” and thereafter, her movements would be closely monitored for the rest of her life. After being gently captured, she was fitted with a GPS “backpack” and released. Until her death four years later, her life was scrutinized by biologists, adding to our understanding of sage-grouse behaviors and their habitat. –Morelli, “A Year in the Life of an Idaho Sage-Grouse”
When I awoke, I was different. Or the world I lived in had changed. Or both.
Something was behind me, over me, on me. I could not see it, but I could feel it covering me so I knew it was there—something with a thin, hard-edged shape that I could not slip free of or away from, try as I might.…
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I was twenty-two when I drove to the storage unit where my best friend’s belongings were. She was also twenty-two, although unlike me, permanently twenty-two. It had been less than two months since her death, and already a new year. I was there to help her mom sort through her things and empty the unit. On the day we drove there to clear it out, the persistent rain had paused. It was the first day that week without torrential downpour.
We arrived that Friday afternoon at the All-Size to assess the situation. The building consisted of long hallways leading into doorways, a dark motel of belongings. Located on the second floor, the unit was positioned between what felt like endless rows of others. We had an hour before closing to enter the locker and plan our attack.…
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We met in the third grade, the same year I started parochial school at Our Lady of the Rosary. We weren’t friends at first. Not that we weren’t friendly, but we weren’t close the first year, nor the second. K was one of the class originals, the ones who had been together since kindergarten, and I was one of two new kids. K was friendly enough to jump rope and hopscotch with the girls, and cool enough to play basketball with the boys. I didn’t play any of the games well enough to know, but she was good at both from what I could tell. She never wore uniform plaid, or pleated skirts with bike shorts like the other girls in our class did. She wore the same polos and khakis as the boys, and I liked that.…
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During her omnipresence in the 1990s, Martha Stewart never did it for me. Of course, I knew of her and was very aware of who she was, but I rarely engaged with her celebrity, being somewhat turned off by her caricatured fussiness, whiteness, and wealth. To me, she epitomized a starched, bland Stepford Wives aesthetic that I thought would be stultifying. Without really knowing of her work, I thought she was exceedingly tasteful, to the point of being antiseptic. Though I was a huge consumer of cooking TV, I never warmed to her oeuvre, assuming her schtick would be too complicated and unattainable. I preferred by celebrity chefs to be chatty, accessible, and fun, like Rachael Ray or even Ina Garten. Martha Stewart would glide across the television screen, her frozen beauty akin to the White Witch from C.S.…
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