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By Margaret Kokka
Time has begun to play an elusive role in my life as I age. Without the guardrails of a given schedule provided by work or caregiving, time becomes ephemeral and instead of treasuring the passage of my limited number of hours, days, or years left, I find myself at the end of the day empty handed and adrift. I lecture myself, to set up a schedule and at the end of the day I should have accomplished some goal I have set for myself,
By Molly Hartle
I throw my bike in the car and drive it down hill to Maple Street. I could start the ride at my house, but I know after doing more than 3,000 feet of climbing, I won’t want to do another 500 to get back up the hill.
By Paul Davis
A cheerful ding-ding announces my presence at the gas pumps just as the sun peeks out behind the SUNOCO sign on Route 9 in Wellesley. An attendant about my age saunters toward me. Up close I can see his greasy, acned face as he peers in at me with a crooked smile.
By Richard Turner
By Gail Kurtz
Palm trees shifted restlessly overhead. The dead fronds around their trunks made them look more like giant bottlebrushes than trees. “Can’t anyone figure out how to trim those things off?” I mumbled to myself. They had the look of ruin.
By David Schweidel
By Mary Lu Everett
I had finished sorting through all my family photos and actually wasn’t thinking about my mother. I was focused instead on choosing the next project I might tackle while “sheltering in place”.
By Evelyn Apte
I can still envision my father’s Marquette touring car as my father, brother Gerhardt, and I embarked on a most unusual journey. We started in the town of Goerlitz where I was born and where my father’s family had lived for
many years. I did not know what a momentous journey it was for us or that it marked the culmination point of several years of planning on my parents’ part.
By Marion Bar-Din
It was the end of April in 1939 and I was finally allowed out of bed where I had amused myself since August of 1938. I was 30 pounds heavier, and my X-rays showed real progress in fighting tuberculosis, which my doctors believed I had developed from drinking the milk of a tubercular cow the past summer on a farm where we vacationed. My parents didn’t send me to a sanitarium in the mountains as the doctors suggested. They kept me at home, fed me six times a day, read to me twice a day, took my temperature four times a day and put it on a chart, gave me a bath once a week (all that was allowed), took me in a taxi every few weeks to the doctor who gave me an X-ray, and bought me a radio (unheard of for a child’s room).
By Margaret Kokka
In the 1930’s my Japanese immigrant parents had forged their life dependent on my father’s work for the Pacific railroad that provided a company owned house. Located in a rural isolated whistle stop in eastern Oregon with no neighbors for miles around, my two brothers and I formed our own playgroup. The three of us (born two years apart) ate, slept, fought, and played together. We shared a nanny goat who provided us with milk, Our playground was along the banks of the nearby Deschutes River or in our backyard covered with tumbleweeds swirling in the hot summer heat. During our first six years we shared childhood diseases—measles, whooping cough and the occasional flu. We grew up without the benefit of electricity, indoor bathroom facilities, or hot running water but this was not experienced as a hardship; the inconvenience of an outhouse, heating water for our outdoor “hot tub” or grinding the gramophone to listen to Japanese music recordings were simply part of our life.