Writing the stuff that hurts I have an essay that went live this week. I wrote it months ago and I’m happy that it’s found a good home. …

A story of loving two men — It wasn’t love at first sight or anything so profound. Instead, it was a gradual process of getting to know one another. Nigel was a biologist. He’d written his doctoral dissertation on the milkweed bug. I learned many interesting facts from Nigel. When I complained about the critters that were…

I always take my camera when I walk the dogs or go to a park. You never know what you’ll see. A gator, a snake, a wood stork, a strange…

How my phone became my BFF — We had a black rotary phone on a small end table in the living room. If I picked it up very carefully and held my breath, I might be lucky and our neighbors, our party-line, wouldn’t know I was listening in. …

It’s not always pretty —

What’s changed in a year? — As a home care nurse in Baltimore, I learned years ago how to get in and out of a house without touching any surface with my bare hands. My first AIDS patient had open sacral wounds and explosive diarrhea. …

To make up my mind — Phyllis had always had a difficult time making up her mind. Her mother never gave her much chance to practice, and so that particular skill just never fully developed. Regular or decaf? Chocolate or vanilla? The white socks or the blue ones? Simple choices people make hundreds of times every…

What do they know? — I met them at a writer’s conference, my first ever. They have become my muses. The people I go to for inspiration, validation, celebration. There were 12 of us in a memoir workshop at Writers in Paradise, the annual writer’s conference at Eckert College. Each of our 25-page submissions were…

But once, I did it anyway — He was in love with the crossing guard. Each day, when we walked the two blocks to take his sister to kindergarten, he would watch in rapture as the guardian saint of children held up her white-gloved hand and commanded the cars to stop. To his three-year-old eyes, that was…