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I’m learning that crying is what it is, not bad, not good. And that dementia is what it is, not bad, not good. And anything can happen in anyone’s life, anywhere, anytime. Not bad, not good.
When twenty first graders were slaughtered and the country responded without a national gun-buyback program, national red-flag laws, universal background checks, a national wait period, a gun registry, an assault-weapons ban, disarming all domestic abusers, ending legal immunity for gun manufacturers, instituting mandatory yearly classes for gun ownership (list all your ideas that could help here), we became complicit.
By Dana SalvadorFebruary 2025I like to be reminded—need to be reminded—that my father was young once, that he had a crush on a girl in his one-room schoolhouse near Ladies Chapel, that he looked forward to helping his aunt Alverdia tend bees or pick watermelon from the large patch near the creek, his feet smeared red with clay.
By Todd DavisFebruary 2025I’ve taken to telling young people that it takes ten years to get from age twenty to age twenty-five, five years to get from twenty-five to thirty, and three years, tops, to get from thirty to forty. So far, forty to fifty doesn’t seem like it’ll amount to much more than a long weekend. The people my age and older laugh knowingly, and the youngsters nod like Sure, sure, whatever you say, Gramps, and I am left, every time, wondering why the only thing we know to do with the stuff that terrifies us is to make jokes about it that aren’t really jokes at all.
The best nights are when moonlight comes through the trees, casting indigo shadows across the ice. My partner swoops around, his arms swinging in front of his crouched body. “It’s the closest we get to flying,” he said once as he sailed past me. Another time: “Maybe this is how a dolphin feels carving through the water.” He loves the tension of the blade slicing across the surface, the whoosh of his skates drawing elaborate patterns on the ice, the crunch of a hockey stop. I listen for the occasional owl.
You patted me down roughly, went through my pockets and pulled out three crumpled twenties, some guitar picks, my stepfather’s pocketknife. “You got drugs, son?”
By Stephen J. LyonsJanuary 2025My bones wake me up at night. It was my hips at first, then my femurs screaming. Now my ankles. But my doctor won’t listen. It started last year when my son and I walked the Camino de Santiago, the ancient pilgrimage route that runs through Spain. I’m sure that’s why my bones hurt—from all the walking.
By Beth AlvaradoJanuary 2025I want to be a good man, a good son, but that’s hard to pull off when it’s 100 degrees and feels like 115 because of the 90 percent humidity—current conditions in southeast Georgia. I’ve come home to visit my eighty-two-year-old mother and assuage some of my guilt for not being here fifty weeks out of the year.
By Matt CashionJanuary 2025I have spent hours in attics, the kind reached by pulling a rope in the ceiling and ascending to a stagnant room. It was in attics that I found love letters tied with ribbons, and wedding dresses in paper boxes the size of coffins, and sepia photographs of uncles in uniform and children who’d died of scarlet fever. I sifted through images of wraparound porches and white chickens, three-legged dogs and men with cigars. I think there is a reason why the past collects in attics: heavily, above us.
By Faith ShearinDecember 2024I can’t believe it took me so long to hold myself accountable for how much my life actually costs. Forty-two feels incredibly, abnormally late to realize that, yes, time is money. And, conversely, money is time—time that someone, somewhere worked.
By Elizabeth Miki BrinaDecember 2024Personal, political, provocative writing delivered to your doorstep every month—without a single ad.
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