What Do I Know?
What do I know, really, of India? That chefs, clad in sparkling white clothes and towering toques, came out often to greet us and ask how we found the food. That every driver who piloted…
Category: Essays
Anas #3 – A Gift of Beauty
I’ve long since told you about my introduction to graduate school at the University of Oregon: deaf landlady, garret room with a naked lightbulb, one refrigerator shelf, reading assignments triple those that I’d experienced in college,…
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…
Marcella’s Thoughts on Sorting, Discarding, and Treasuring Sh*t
There appears to be good money in writing a book on how to manage all the belongings that we collect. Most recently, I succumbed to downloading Nobody Wants Your Sh*t: The Art of Decluttering Before You…
Ideals
I am ancient. When I was born in 1946, electricity hadn’t arrived at many rural farms. Party telephone lines connected outlying families. Visitors arrived in McPherson on trains. Our family was a decade away from…
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…
Try a Little . . .*
I’m still looking for antidotes to the cruelty and brutality of those who currently “govern” us. An antitoxin to the pure heartlessness of those who are stripping this country and much of the world of…
Forget the Perfect Offering
I have always found words when I needed them. To send condolences and birthday good wishes and “thinking of you” notes. To steer the owner of a lovely historic bungalow toward National Register listing. To…
Gods
When my older sister, Ellen, was 4 or 5, she and a neighbor girl were playing in the front yard of our Berkeley house. The friend, who lived across the street, was the daughter of a…
Adored
This weekend, I did not lift my emotional or mental eyes to Washington D.C. To the unfathomable horror—the selfishness, the cruelty, the venality, the chaos being legitimized there. Dante’s exact nine circles of hell made manifest…