Part One is here Throughout the day winds howled as an ice monster crept over the town, his goal, to flash freeze everything living and lock us all in houses where our illusion of safety would be challenged by falling trees, downed power lines and out-of-control fires which firemen couldn’t reach. Between the ho, ho, ho […]
Originally posted on JT Twissel in 2013, my first year of blogging. My children call this my favorite Christmas story to tell. They had no tree, they had no presents but they did have…. The year the Hong Kong flu swept the country, killing thousands and leaving others to beg for death, I was temping […]
In honor of Holocaust Remembrance – Amy’s Story My parents died when I was eighteen. It happened a long time ago. What does it matter? It was a concentration camp and they are dead and it was a long time ago. Why travel? I play bridge. I’m a Life Master. I don’t play with amateurs; […]
Over Christmas I got an out-of-the-blue email from someone I rarely hear from and have little in common with however he and I have one of those bonds that cannot be explained and will never be broken. You see, we knew and loved the same person. A woman whose crystal heart broke early on, leaving […]
We drove into Montreal from a farm fifty miles north of Ottawa where in early October communion water had already frozen in the unheated chapel where nuns and novitiates chanted at 5:00 am every morning. Life with the “B” hadn’t been nearly as idyllic as C had led us to believe. In fact, K thought […]
My father didn’t dwell in the past. In fact, he treated any attempt to delve into family history as a rude and useless waste of his time. For that reason we grew up knowing only the bare bones about his family – particularly his father’s side. People would appear from time to time introduced as […]
I never liked my stepmother but now she’s dying and her surviving children have closed their eyes and she reaches out to me. She puts a fragile hand over mine and unexpectedly I cry. “How lovely that your roommate is Mrs. W!” I am thrashing about in frigid water like the Liberace-style piano […]
