Stuck: The Prequel to the Great Spider Massacre of 1992

The house on Elm Street, where I battled a giant spider during a snow hurricane, was old, square and brown. It had a big front porch and was close to my daughter’s school and all the places we liked to hang out. We loved the inside, which had several sets of French doors leading to…

Nothing Left Undone

A couple of weeks ago I lent my Mother-in-law a book. It was A Paris Wife, by Paula McLain; a novel based on the first marriage of Ernest Hemingway to Hadley Richardson.  I had bought it  for myself and had already started  reading it but noticed when we saw her that she didn’t have a book,…

Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs

During a beautiful fall weekend in 2001 the Chicken family hosted an open house. Twenty minutes before the start of the open house, someone saw Algernon streak across the kitchen floor. Algernon was one of S’s three pet mice.  The mice were okay, as pets go, except for Algernon, who should have been named Houdini…

Vi Chronicles: How to Raise a Thief

Hi World, My  mother, Violet, had two sisters and seven kids. I was the youngest of my mother’s kids, and the youngest cousin. On the day I learned to steal, the three sisters, Vi (my mother), Tee and Lula,  found themselves a pick-up truck and a willing teen-age driver.  They packed a cooler with ice,…