It’s scary sometimes how you can be going along in your life thinking you’ve got everything all sewn up, and suddenly you don’t. I hit my sixties and felt I’d finally gotten […]
Knives Out: A Love Story With Wicked Edges
My Best Love Affair? May-December Romance FTW!
Out of all the love affairs of my life, the most unlikely has by far been the most satisfying and most loving— the affair with a man twenty-five years my senior. We’ve been together fifteen years. Things have changed, but not in the way you might expect.
What She Said, May 27: Mignon McLaughlin
A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, and always with the same person.
–Mignon McLaughlin
My May-December Romance, a Dozen Years In
“If you marry an older man, one day you’ll be married to an old man,” a woman I met several years ago told me. She’d been married for nearly three decades to […]
Statute of Limitations – A Short Story by Paula Whyman
by Paula Whyman “Statute of Limitations” first appeared in the March-April 2009 issue of Bethesda Magazine. Ginny was making dinner for Mike’s friends, Pogo and Ann. They’d never been to the new house […]
Playlist- “The Long Run”
By Karen Lynch. “I know how to shoot to kill, but I can’t shoot a gun out of a man’s hand. Civilians always think cops can do that, but only Annie Oakley could have pulled off that sort of trick. I know how to stay married, but I don’t how to keep passion burning in a long marriage, and maybe I also view those who say they can as I do Annie, rare, unlikely, and highly skilled.”
Blue Canaries
My fiancé arrives home from a twelve hour shift. He left in the pre-dawn darkness, and has arrived after winter’s dusk.
“Who died?” I ask when I greet him at the door, motioning to the black band across his badge. A thin blue line on the band serves as a marker for his profession.
“The deputy in Leon Country,” he says, leaving his boots by the door. “You didn’t hear?”
“No,” I say. “What happened?”
He tells me about the fire and the ambushed deputies, and I’m reminded of the nickname firefighters have given cops–blue canaries.
Wearing Mom
by Gianna Russo There is no way she would miss it. Nothing would keep my mother away from the wedding of her first grandchild—not even her death nearly five years earlier. […]
Mountains and DNA
By Julia Connolly Driving up the crumbling mountain road I’m bombarded by metaphors, snuck up on by similes. As we near the site of the wedding I’m silently singing the words to […]
Walking Alone in Late Winter
by Jane Kenyon How long the winter has lasted—like a Mahler symphony, or an hour in the dentist’s chair. In the fields the grasses are matted and gray, making me think of June, […]
The Gloria Sirens 