It's not like I had a full reservoir of emotional strength that morning.  I was in the middle of my divorce with two young sons to watch go through that horrible process, my husband and I were still living in the same house, I was trying to finish up my undergraduate degree a… Read full post »

When my plane landed at Dulles, it was raining and there was a thunderstorm approaching.  I'd sat on the plane for several hours with the cooler, a purply-red Igloo Playmate, taking up the space under the seat in front of me where my feet should have been.  It was after 9:00pm,… Read full post »

I used to love to fly. Seriously. I even enjoyed the turbulence, maybe because I grew up in California and was used to the ground shimmying and shaking under my feet. In any case, I was not afraid of flying.

Until, that is, 2004.

I… Read full post »

My father was a serial husband. His first marriage, when he was very young and she was even younger, ended in an annulment. At the age of twenty-eight, he married my mother, four years his senior. That was in 1951. Twenty-one years later, I was summoned home from a babysitting job… Read full post »

Here are some of the things that happened during the week I was in South Dakota following my twin brother's traumatic brain injury.  He was in the hospital and on a paralytic drug to keep him immobile until the extent of his injuries could be fully ascertained.   

 1.&nb… Read full post »

In November of 1994, several months before our fortieth birthday, my twin brother fell twenty feet onto a concrete floor. He'd been staining the ceiling of an addition to an old church, and had ridden the planks of the scaffold down when they slid off the metal frame structure. His hands,… Read full post »