by Marian Beaman The Damage Mouth agape, wide-eyed and stunned at the WaWa station – I beheld a tee-shirted man holding a frosty drink and belly laughing at me. In the bay just ahead, this guy observed what I failed to see: two traffic cones smashed under my two wheels. Not one, but two—smashed flat! […]
By B. Lynn Goodwin Volunteers matter—especially when emergencies come up. At the Butte County Fairgrounds in November my husband and I found a mixture of hope and despair, of gratitude and anguish. We couldn’t get near “Paradise Lost,” as reporters dubbed the Northern California town ravaged by fire, so we went to the tent cities […]
by Ariela Zucker “Up to a foot of snow,” the smug-looking weatherman announces on the six o’clock news. “Thirty million Americans in the path of the storm,” numbers are always a convincing tool in scare tactics. “More than six states,” he continues to plant the seeds of doom. “Stay in if you do not have […]
by Linda C. Wisniewski I had forgotten light arrives before the sunrise, that the sun sends beams in advance of its peek above the horizon, so slowly there is no single moment when darkness turns to light. Dawn is a gradual process, like my sons growing up before my eyes. I saw it coming when […]
by Ariela Zucker Nine o’clock at night and all is quiet. I doze in my hospital bed when suddenly the monitor I am hooked to with many leads starts flashing an angry red. Startled I look up at the heartbeat counter, it shows a big red 0. Before I manage to move, five people show […]
by Sara Etgen-Baker As a small child, I loved walking backward and did so every chance I got. One day, I even challenged myself and walked backward almost the entire distance from my house to my elementary school. I’d walked forward along that route hundreds of times. But when I walked it backward, suddenly everyone […]
