I noticed the post on Facebook suggesting that you remove the bottom of the pumpkin…
Widow’s Weeds 06: Vegetables Help
I had been putting off serious thought about the menu for Dan’s memorial this coming Saturday, now exactly one week off. Putting together a video and assembling a play list had been a diversion. I worried, moreover, that if I didn’t get it started, I might have...
Persistent Persimmons
It seemed like a good idea, some fifteen years ago or so. Plant a couple of persimmon trees, be patient, harvest the fruit. So I waited–patiently–long long past the five-year mark by which time I should have been seeing flowers. Nothing. Not a blossom, not...
Widow’s Weeds 5: The Grandkids Are All Right
Well, technically they’re his and not mine, but they are all I have. Anyway, I’ve had the full experience from diapers through adolescence to adulthood. An Old Joke There is an old joke I told students to explain why young artists reject the styles and aesthetic...
Widow’s Weeds 4: A Single Place Setting
Dining has changed from a social activity to little more than a chore. Granted, Dan’s appetite faltered considerably over the past year or two. As Covid threw a pall over all our lives, I had taken over food shopping as a defensive posture. Dan’s increasing fragility...
Widow’s Weeds 3: Heart’s Desire
Unless I want to be an Edie, Big or Little, in an ersatz-colonial Grey Gardens, I need to begin the process of emptying this house. We’ve been happy here. At least I think so. It is hard, indeed, to truly know what Dan was thinking about much of anything....
Widow’s Weeds 2: Sell My Home? I Live In My Home!
Do I want to sell my house? No, I do not. At least not now and not to you, whoever you are. That has been my answer to phone calls and what I would respond to the people who send letters. Vultures, the bunch of them. Carrion Eaters They read the obituaries and do the...
The Harford 100-Mile Biennial Exhibition: The Educator’s Eye
Marcia Gayle Snee is a wonderful artist and dear friend, so when she said her work had been accepted into a juried exhibition at Harford Community College’s Chesapeake Gallery, I was thrilled for her. Curious, also, about just what might be in the exhibition....
Dialysis 4: Mountains of Waste
Home hemodialysis ends. It always does, whether that person gets a transplant, changes over to in-center treatment or dies. Right now I should be mourning my loss but instead I am consumed by anger and disgust at the assault on the environment that home hemodialysis...