Topics | Parenting | The Sun Magazine #5

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Parenting

Readers Write

Bread

A family recipe, a childhood memory, a Depression-era handout

By Our Readers August 2021
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

May You Bury Me

In three years, I thought, Lia’s chin would reach my crown. Or my crown would touch her chin? At some point the height order reverses itself, and then they leave you. Or you are overtaken by someone’s respiratory droplets in the produce section and you leave first.

By Kate Vieira July 2021
Quotations

Sunbeams

Children begin by loving their parents; as they grow older they judge them; sometimes they forgive them.

Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray

July 2021
Poetry

The Buttonhook

My son sprinted to each traffic light / in his black hat and dark Sabbath suit / while the elderly congregation two miles away / waited for him to help lead morning prayers.

By Yehoshua November June 2021
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

What Clouds

When I need to think, I clean. I sort and organize. I give away scores of possessions. In my mind I repeat the word away, away, away. I need clear, open space before I can even begin to understand the latest problem I’ve conjured for myself.

By Meg Thompson June 2021
Readers Write

The Woods

As a refuge, as a threat, as a place to live

By Our Readers June 2021
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Inheritance

I would like to give you a metaphor that describes what it’s like to potentially pass on to one’s children a pathogenic variant that will possibly go on to kill them, but everything I am coming up with is histrionic.

By Debbie Urbanski May 2021
Readers Write

Ghosts

On the phone, at a gas station, in our dreams

By Our Readers April 2021
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Beat The Old Lady Out

I couldn’t see the loaves in her oven, but I could smell them. They smelled like the perfect weight of blankets on a winter night; like the loving and attentive parents I thought I deserved; like the solution to every natty problem that might crop up in life.

By Debra Gwartney March 2021
Essays, Memoirs, & True Stories

Funeral For A Hamster

I was unable to protect my children from heartache. I couldn’t keep them from the pain of it. But I could ease their journey by helping them light their dead hamster’s funeral pyre.

By Andrew Johnson March 2021