About a year and a half ago my parents sold the house that I grew up in.

It wasn’t just the house that I grew up in.

It’s the house where my sister, and then many years later, my daughter, were brought home to sleep in a crib within walls that had already seen the beginnings of two other women in my family.

The house was in my family for four generations, although at one point, there was a fifth.

My childhood was spent in that little (kind of too little) Cape on a hill. I lived with my great-grandmother, … Read the rest

I’m not a lucky kind of person.

When I was younger, I used to go to Foxwoods to play BINGO quite often.

I loved the whole experience of it – waiting in line to get my cards, then going over to the two-dollar dobber store and picking out which color I wanted (usually pink or green), and then finding a place to sit in the massive room that had a haze of cigarette smoke hanging above everyone’s head.

My friend(s) and I would set up somewhere and then look around and make fun of all the people who brought entire … Read the rest

“All I’ve ever wanted is to be a writer” is a sentence I’m sure I and many other writers have uttered throughout life, and it’s true but also not true.

There was a time in childhood when I watched the movie SpaceCamp over and over and over again and then was taken to the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. where I doubled down on my dream.

I took home posters of the Milky Way and a Space Shuttle pointing at the sky, its bottom engulfed in the flames from the rockets about to take them away.

I … Read the rest

I have been feeling awful lately.

Since I had COVID-19 for the third time in December of 2022, my body has not been the same.

I have a running list of symptoms that I’ve been dealing with since then:

• Fatigue
• Brain Fog
• Joint Pain (worse than usual)
• Hot flashes
• Heat intolerance
• Constant dry mouth
• Sleep Apnea
• Hyperparathyroidism
• Iron Deficiency Anemia
• B-12 deficiency
• Neuropathy
• Depression (worse than usual)
• Anxiety (worse than usual)
• Forgetfulness/memory issues
• High blood pressure
• Tachycardia
• swelling in the feet and ankles
• and did I mention the oppressive, crushing, painful, and relentless fatigue?

I just had a nuclear stress … Read the rest

When I was younger, there is no doubt that my most ideal day, beginning to end, would be one spent in New York City.

I might even want to spend that day there alone, because I did that once, I went for three days and two nights alone, and it was the best trip to the city I can remember.

I took the train, a little over two hours from New Haven to Grand Central, and I sat writing in my journal and listening to music.

But the people around me didn’t know that part of that time I wasn’t … Read the rest