'I am dreaming of a plate full of fluffy, cheesy scrambled eggs, streaked with a couple of red skid marks of Tabasco and a side plate of triangles of buttered toast. Preferably, wheat. But I will take white, if it is all Minney has got ...'
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FIRST/PERSON: Finding Yo-Yo Ma playing cello in the West Virginia hills
Who was that man bowing a cello against a tree in the New River Gorge? Why, it's none other than one of the world's best known and loved instrumental maestros. And he has something to say as well as to play.
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FIRST/PERSON: Why I Have Four First Names
"They were both the most cussed, stubborn people you’d ever meet, my Dad and Mom, when they come together over something that stood them apart. “Both would not give up their position on the proper naming of you,” said K. “So, they agreed to disagree. And gave you all four names.”
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FIRST/PERSON: ‘A Wild Woman Love Story’
Once upon a time, a round-faced girl with curly hair and identity issues was told by someone (that genuinely loved her) that she was not "model pretty" like her sister but that she could be "mother pretty" ...
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FIRST/PERSON: A few highly personal words on choice
"Three pregnancies. No choice in any of them. I have never chosen to get pregnant. I was foolish, I was sucker-punched, I was surprised. I was naïve, I was savvy. I wasn’t ready, I was ready. Such a basic right that everyone deserves. CHOICE."
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FIRST/PERSON: Traveling West Virginia’s backroads in the Byrdmobile
"I once worked for a man who had been an Exalted Cyclops in the Ku Klux Klan — and I’m proud of it. Not because he was a Klan member more than three-quarters of a century ago, but because of what he became afterward ..."
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The sink as a refuge of sanctuary & solidarity
'I am at one with a long line of the faithful, monks of Ireland, or Tibet, or France, silently preparing or cleaning up from the day’s meals, mindfully caring for community, or in readiness to offer hospitality.
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Teach your children well — but not what to think
'Your children are not your property. They belong to the future. You cannot make them duplicates of your opinions, values and habits. And if you did, life would soon break them, teaching them that the ideas and understandings of the last generation do not serve the next.'
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FIRST/PERSON: How COVID concerns ate my homework and (maybe) saved my life
Had I just been infected? Was he sick? It's a question we've learned to ask ourselves in this year and a half of plague. I had let my pandemic guard down.
