5 Consideratons When Preparing for Your Digital Girls’ Night

I have several friends who live out of state. I rarely see them and our friendships, which used to be so intimate, have grown distant. While we all want to stay in touch, life often prevents us from doing so minus the texts and Facebook status updates we trade—and even those are less frequent then we’d like. Our friendships seem reduced to 100-word impersonal musings and memes about husbands, kids and milestones and/or the annual girls’ night or weekend.

Five Senses: A Short Work of Fiction

She died on a Tuesday, before her nail appointment, but after electrolysis. Karen remembered the way the homeless man shuffled his feet, one of his shoes cut in two. He’d pieced them together with what looked like a metal hanger. She thought him quiet clever, but didn’t tell him so. The man smelled of lemons and piss. The lemons were from her childhood, but the piss belonged to him.

Incarceration & Childhood: 5 Alarming Similarities

Recently I watched an old episode of Scared Straight. On the show parents send their out of control children to live amongst prisoners so they will get their shit straight before they actually end up in real prison. While watching I realized three things:

Ghosts

As I walk through my home, the one I make with my children, there are ghosts everywhere--reminders of the person I used to be. My grandmother's dining room table, bought when I was in eighth grade, just before Christmas, was inherited after her death. The children use it to color pictures and draw worlds culled from their imaginations. The chairs, already reupholstered once, wear the various stains a life with children dictates, and the wood is wearing down and uneven.