About a month ago my Dad and I sat down over a couple days, with the tape recorder, and he told me a few stories about his days as a detective in the Michigan State Police. We spent most of that time discussing one particular murder case, that he always thought would make a great [...]
“Decor tends to out-of-date calendars, mismatched crockery, paintings of bears in the forest, and lace curtains hanging in doorways to defend against mosquitoes.” I read this description several times, in a perfectly-timed National Geographic article about the Russian dacha, which is a fully Russian cultural element, and is basically the little plot of land where [...]
The average age of an American woman when she has her first child is 24.9. I am 24. I am in the midst of many women–my age, younger, older, all of us in our twenties–who have had children already, or are having them soon, or are planning, or coping with issues, illnesses, miscarriages, fertility questions, and anywhere [...]
Last week, I took a day trip down to Dublin, Georgia, where my parents have lived for almost ten years. I went to spend some time with my Mom, leading up to her 55th birthday, but also to got through some things they still have in storage that need to be whittled down as they [...]
Inside the NAMES Project Foundation headquarters, where the AIDS Memorial Quilt is stored: This corner is for quilt panels that have not yet been combined with others to make the enormous quilt squares (composed of eight panels, each of which is 3 feet by 6 feet). The squares are about as tall, when complete, as [...]
The squares are bigger than you could even imagine. They command the room, the space. What a powerful source of memory, of honoring those who we have lost to AIDS. As I have written about a few times already , I have been exploring the many squares on the AIDS Memorial Quilt, and have been remembering [...]
At one of my favorite childhood places, the children’s wing of the Dickinson County Library in Iron Mountain, Michigan, I have two specific memories. One is a compilation of the many hours I spent sitting in the carpet-lined claw-foot bathtub someone had brilliantly installed there, making it suddenly the most fun place to read a book. The [...]