For Darryl, Kate, Jerry and Cassandra

Yesterday, I walked into the corporate offices of a Title Company and, signing my name a dozen times to legal documents,  liberated three acres of land from the speculative real estate market.

I was sent into an empty boardroom to wait.

I’ve been to three unrelated performances lately in which the male performers stripped down to their underwear onstage, not provocatively but to symbolically expose their hidden selves. As theater it worked, partly because the actors were all young and handsome, but...

I sit here waiting for a call from the hospital to schedule an appointment with a surgeon, my body on fire and all my pain receptors on high alert. It turns out my aortic aneurism was not that at all, but instead I’ve got something called a paraesophageal hiatus...

for Nicole, for the last time

I arrived home from Vermont with a tick burrowed in my thigh, and spent my first morning here in the Emergency Room getting it pried out. Since I was in the hospital anyway, I decided to take care of some routine tests I’d been ignoring for awhile, only to receive some totally unexpected results. It seems that I have something called an aortic aneurism; if it should burst, I am told, I could be dead in five minutes!

for Rebecca

Today I weeded the strawberry patch at my brother’s farm and it felt like I was weeding myself as well. Pull a weed, remember an emotion from childhood. As I toss it on the mulch pile, the memories crowd my throat and the tears fall.

It is early Spring here in Vermont, the world has turned a tender green, the waterfalls are thundering, and the weeds are trying to take over the gardens.

in memory of Alan Balsam M.D.

By the cricks in my knees, the forgetfulness of my brain and the grandmotherly face that looks back at me in the mirror, it is clear that I am aging. Kneeling in the garden is a thing of the past and so is chocolate before bedtime.

for Larisa Blum

The moon was full last night and we celebrated the first night of Passover at a seder, reading from the Haggadah the story of the Jews’ long-ago exile in Egypt when we were slaves. I’ve listened to the history of my people’s tribulations at dozens of seders, but last night I think I heard it for the first time.

And did not like it at all.

for Helen Chen and Lu Ming This past week, a week that included the one-day revival of the film ‘1984’ playing all across the country, a woman in town took her life and a mare in the paddock next to the farm birthed a new foal. I had not planned to go see a film I...

Twelve years ago, coming home from the movies one night I made one of the biggest mistakes of my life – I ran over a woman riding a motor scooter. In the dark street, I simply didn’t see her. I had caught her on the shoulder and she was pinned beneath my car,...

for A.R and T.L. With the new administration bringing up the problem of our collective “shadow,” some friends and I have been asking ourselves about our own shadows, recognizing that our personal issues are true for the society at large as well. These are not...