Elderhood

By Karen Hunt

     Once, many years ago, I was riding in the backseat of ’64 Mustang, going downhill in a snowstorm, and the brakes went out. There were four of us along with textbooks and suitcases crammed into that Mustang. We were college kids heading home for Christmas break, five hours into an eight-hour drive. Until the moment the driver started frantically pumping the brakes and downshifting, we’d been singing to the radio to keep awake. Carefree and oblivious. Through the driving snow we could see a red stop light at the bottom of the hill and a line of cars and semis on either side of the intersection. We fell silent as we barreled toward the light. Just as we thought our brief young lives were over, the light turned green. We flew through the intersection, then to avoid slamming into a car that suddenly appeared in front of us, we careened off the road into a frozen corn field where, screaming and cursing at this point, we eventually slid to a stop, shaken but upright. I remember that once we knew everybody was alright, we broke into laughter, wild, uncontrolled, adrenalin-filled joy. What a relief it was to be alive.

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Reflections on January 6

By Karen Hunt

The day after the bloody siege on the Capitol, I dug out an 8 x 12 black and white glossy of a bunch of teenagers standing on its steps. There’s me and forty-six classmates posing with our Congressman, John B. Anderson (who would later run for president as an Independent). We’d just graduated a few days before, the Hanover High School class of 1966. For three days we’d been packed on a bus, traveling from our little town in Illinois, stopping along the way to tour Gettysburg.

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The Gals

By Karen Hunt

My mother stands at the kitchen window in a worn chenille housecoat and bunny slippers watching Uncle Roscoe hang up laundry on the clothesline next door. She lights a Chesterfield. Her ritual is to take a long drag, pick the tobacco off of her tongue, then blow out a small gray cloud. She’s fond of saying that if she liked cigarettes any better, she’d eat the goddamned things.

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