By: Cynthia Sillitoe I have to admit, at first I walked past my new cat. My mom and I were at the Phoenix Humane Society. In my early twenties, I was homebound due to chronic illness. I was still grieving the loss of my childhood cat who had been my constant companion. Life without her was unbearable. Finding a new feline was a strange experience. Cats had always found us. They showed up on our porch and couldn’t understand why…
by Nikki Stern At 7:30 a.m. on a summer morning, the northern Wisconsin air did not yet hint at the promise of another typically beautiful day. Our twelve-year-old selves, denied the future pleasures of hot coffee, had stoked ourselves with pancakes and bacon. Dressed in the camp uniform of blue shorts and white blouses, some of us with navy cardigans to ward off the lingering chill, we made our way to the platform, picked up our .22 caliber rifles and…
by Andrea Crowley-Hughes One “cannot discover new oceans unless [they] have the courage to lose sight of the shore.” – Andre Gide (modified to be friendlier to other genders than “he”) When you’re traveling with anxiety, sometimes this quote makes a ton of sense, and other times it just sounds impossible. It can feel delightful to arrive at your destination, greeted by place names and accents the mind can curl around and explore until the words become familiar. In my…
by Gretchen Hanson For many of us it started early, an insidious lesson we were taught so young it became a part of who we are. For me, it was my mother’s friend bathing me with too much attention to my private parts. Then it was my beloved uncle putting me to bed at night when I was six, touching first, later the private “games” I was to tell no one about. Keep quiet, I was told, it’s our…
by Gretchen Hanson The San Diego of my childhood was not the glossy high rises of the center city or the quaint architecture of the Gas Lamp District. It was a gritty border town of often unpaved roads, homes that were little more than adobe covered cement and mangy coyotes who ate your unwatched cats. In huge tracts of brush, immigrants without the protection of documentation were living hard. Bars were on every main street corner and often smelled of…