Jazz: Call and Response
We could, for that hour, talk one 17-year-old to another. Our voices, the patterns of our speech, the images in our head caught in the amber of youth. Burnished, deepened, sweetened by fifty years of…
Category: Essays
Bulletin Boards
Who hung the four-by-five-foot, white-against- white framed bulletin board on the east wall of our bedroom? Part of my modest 4-H home improvement project; Mother’s wise choice even before that? I can’t remember. But by…
Here
Dying here, in this place to which I’m grafted, doesn’t seem so hard. Breathing easy, beyond struggle, down the road past fear. I settle in beside Dave’s ashes on the bluff above the North Fork,…
On What We Build Our Lives
I will myself back to the top of our basement stairs at 830 North Ash—our “new” basement—goose-bump chilly, a little skittish at the edge of darkness and rising dank. Hungry nonetheless for the lives that…
Mad Men of McPherson
Never mind nepotism, employees’ kids claimed hiring priority. Three months away from my first college classes, I needed better wages than the library offered. And my father’s twenty years with Farmer’s Alliance Insurance Company recommended…
Carnegie’s Angels
In memory, they materialize on the library steps, framed by columns and classical arches. Half-cameo stills in ancient hairdos. Half-Charlie’s Angels silhouettes, taut, poised to fuel a child’s dreams, revive a trapped housewife, track facts. …
Froggies
Before I put Tricia back on the Empire Builder to Seattle for her required tour-guide training, we spend the night in Valier. Maybe, just maybe, the Stone School Inn can give Lucca’s Hotel La Luna…
Whose Treasure
They counted on easy agreement—the natural gas company bigwigs. They’d planned to bury their pipeline beneath those Missouri River shallows, slide it under badland slumps, save miles. They needed a fistful of permits including our…
What’s Left
As I write, here at 73, I’m down one breast, a toe, a tooth, my tonsils, my uterus, the hearing and balance nerves in my left ear, the crisp vision that intact macula provide, and…
Ah Sweet Mystery of Life
Swear to god, for all too long, I owed my philosophy of life to Rogers and Hammerstein, Victor Herbert, Mario Lanza, George Gershwin and—the Church of the Brethren. In the beginning, of course, I attended…