I was raised in the Midwest. My blood sings with a heavy German accent, and my DNA is imprinted with a blue-collar work ethic. I was brought up to believe if you weren’t ill, you should be sweating. The South has taught me to slow down. Granted it’s taken me a few years, but I do appreciate a good drawl and the rock of a porch swing.Continue Reading

The past few weeks have been a roller coaster ride. My emotions, like eggs rolling on the coaster car’s floor between my feet. I try to stop them, but they crack and ooze with a gooey reality check.

I’ve been on hormone replacement for years, and I was under a delusion my emotions were under control – that I was too old and therefore no longer at the mercies of this monthly ride. How foolish we humans are, so easily sucked into our fantasies of power and restraint. A tiny pill, half the size of a pencil eraser, one milligram, zapped my myth. Between our insurance provider insisting on a generic medication substitution or pay through-the-nose, and our drugstore closing because of Obama insurance restructuring, I was left for a month without my milligram of hormonal sanity.Continue Reading

The room is empty, devoid of students. Chow in 100 comes early and always during literacy class. Through the door I watch two female deputies work the tower, a raised area in the center quad of three large dorms that house thirty women each, and my classroom. Food carts squeak. Trustees push plastic trays through portals in locked massive, metal doors. Women wave and mouth verboten greetings through heavy windows laced with wire mesh. Phones ring. Walkie-talkies squawk. Voices loud – laughing, scolding, praising, joking.Continue Reading

Reading something recently, the piece stated the author was from Belarus. Something in my gut said Slavic (the woman’s surname possibly), but I could no more picture or remember a country called Be-lar-us. My last formal geography lesson was 1967 when Russia was the United Soviet Socialist Republic, and all those little countries were clumped together in a big pink blob on the map.
My memory on a good day is like Swiss cheese. I sit on the aged block of yellowing, curdled milk and contemplate the holes. In comparison, my engineer husband has a perfectly symmetrical mind, filled with boxes, stacked for easy sorting. Like an aging Alice, I jump into one of the holes and ask my spouse, “Where’s Belarus?”Continue Reading