ANAS – What Next . . . .?
Here’s a little confession: when I am dying for something sweet—something close to a piece of candy—I’ve been known to buy a bag of marshmallows. Far cheaper than chocolates. And reasonable on the calorie front: Four…
Category: Advancing Years
Time Travel – The Wages of Memory
I’ve been sorting. Four file drawers. A dozen battered, legal file folders—the old kind that tied shut. A couple odd boxes. With an assortment of labels: Mementoes, Training Materials, Favorite Quotations, Keepsakes, Writings. The detritus, maybe the harvest, of 80…
Wishing
Many mornings, in the flicker between sleep and waking, I’m back in my childhood house on Ash Street in McPherson. In that blue bedroom with the white dressing table and bureau, my bulletin board, the fragile…
Ana #5 – Aprons*
Yes, I know that I can’t take any of my treasures into the next world. And yes, I’ve been slowly sorting and purging. At least of the easy stuff: jam and jelly jars; abandoned clothes; a…
The Man I’ll Never Know Well
On October 16, 1940, sometime on his wedding day, my dad, Paul Sherfy, registered with the McPherson County, Kansas, draft board. He identified his employer as the local newspaper and his soon-to-be wife, as his…
Colors
I do it every year: retool some part of my house—a wall from which I jettison current pictures and replace them with something more striking, more colorful. Or trade one set of tchotchkes on a particular…
It’s Complicated
My father, Paul Sherfy, died on February 24, 2002, at eighty-nine in the health-care wing of the Cedars Retirement Community—a Church of the Brethren facility in McPherson, Kansas. I’d seen my dad several weeks before his…
Homesick
I’m homesick. Not for Kansas. Or Oregon’s ill-lit garret and steady rain. Or the terror I knew every day facing juniors in my US History classes at Francis Scott Key High School. Or the fear…
Falling
Yesterday, I watched a trio of middle-schoolers leaping down the street. Full blown leaping. Launching up beyond a jump, hovering in mid-air, and coming down in a beautiful curve. They seemed to possess utter confidence in body…
Blest Be the Tie that Binds
Blessed be the tie that binds Our hearts in Christian love; The fellowship of kindred mindsIs like that to that above. Before our Father’s throne We pour our ardent prayers;Our fears, our hopes, our aims are one Our comforts…