Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that you’re considering getting old. We don’t recommend this course of action, of course, because the risks greatly outweigh the advantages. But if you must age, here are a few tips to help you navigate what can be a fun time in your life, if you take the proper precautions. Keep in mind that the main skill required for this period of your life is that of settling; as in settling for things you had never considered you would need to settle for in the first place. … Continue reading Tips For Aging Women by Christine McDowell Tucker→
Before the Ambulance I saw him collapse on the trail that divides the golf course, then climbs and looks over the valley crowded with townhouses for fifty-five and older. If we entered the fallen man’s home we could see the forever stamps in folded sheaths of waxed paper neatly tucked beside reading glasses, an hourglass, and gadgets that calculate distance and day. We’d see the unused weekly planners and the used that annotated the meetings with doctors and accountants and one for a lawyer that was crossed out. As the siren from down the hill … Continue reading Before the Ambulance and Dandelion, 2 poems by Dennis Cummings→
What’s happening to me? Downstairs I can hear my wife Ann with our two-year-old Isabella, their sounds bubbling up from the kitchen. The scrape of spoon on bowl. The cooed urgings: Another bite? Zoom zoom! Izzy’s delighted yawp. But for some reason I can’t go down the stairs. Every time I try, lowering my right foot onto the top step, the padded carpet giving way, I start to lose my balance and heave myself back up, almost knocking the wedding photo of my mom and dad off the wall. I feel groggy like I’ve … Continue reading Downstairs by Gary Duehr→
“Your new life is gonna cost you your old one.” —Margot Berman I forget if it was around the time of a full moon or another supercharged energy portal that I tend to lose track of, but just when I had made the decision to try out this nomadic lifestyle, an intuitive friend posted that message online. It felt kinda ominous. But also reassuring that as giant of a leap as this was, it was also arriving at a fitting time. Sure, I thought, it’ll cost me familiarities and conveniences of DC life. Creature comforts … Continue reading The (Very Uncomfortable) Art of Letting Go: When Movers Lose All Your Furniture by Katie Wilkes→
On the black and white TV, we watched silently, as an American soldier fell into a field of static like he was falling fast asleep, tumbling down the screen, out of sync with the signal, dropping one horizontal line at a time. Then, someone’s daughter came running out to us with her arms raised. They called her the Little Napalm Girl because she burned with Napalm’s invisible fire. She looked to be exactly my age at the time, caught on the camera in this first war, televised. My dad didn’t want me to see her, … Continue reading Little Napalm Girl by Jean Mikhail→
We write for a target audience. Readers differ in their demographics as well as their literary tastes. When my novel, Never, was published, I began meeting with book groups, and they were all baby boomers like me. I realized I’d written a book for my own generation. Never is a coming-of-age story that takes place in the segregated south. Folks my age (I’m turning seventy) can remember Martin Luther King and the turbulent sixties. Southern readers have shared with me their memories of growing up with a Black maid, often articulating a version of the bewildered … Continue reading Writing For A Generation by Joel F. Johnson→
What Horses Say What’s to be made of the field of buttercups, a saffron sea at the bend of the road, with the three horses ….one black with white mane and tail …one coppered like a new penny ….one white as an angel a triumvirate of muscled peace and perfection. What’s to be made of thinking of 3 recently dead friends every single time I drive past the most laughably maudlin reach for meaning when the real story is simple: Time is real- the realest unseen thing undocumented, untouchable a mystery deeper than … Continue reading What Horses Say and Stains, 2 poems by Rita Quillen→
Jeanne Malmgren is the 2nd place winner of Streetlight’s 2024 Essay/Memoir Contest This should be a quick in-and-out, I’m thinking. As we walk into the Department of Motor Vehicles, I’m cheered to see the line isn’t too long. We’re here for a simple errand, to change our driver’s licenses from Florida to South Carolina. It’s as mundane as any of the other chores related to moving to a new state. This DMV office is home turf for me. It’s just down the road from the country hospital where I was born. This is the … Continue reading Blindsided by Jeanne Malmgren→
The one and only time I put a knife in my pocket heading out to church was on Sunday, December 13, 1981. My mother, a single parent, was working a night shift, and my job at age eleven, in a true latchkey-kid fashion, was to get myself and my seven-year-old sister to holy mass. That was far from unusual. I was in charge on most Sunday mornings at that age. I’d usually wake up early, turn on channel one (of two), and watch cartoons for a few minutes before anything else. That morning, instead … Continue reading Writing Through Autocracy by Karol Lagodzki→
It was a flat grey stone, the kind you found in tourist shops, with pre-set words. What a strange gift from Andrea, I’d thought, and plunked it into my pocket—carelessly. Only later, I found my hand often curving around it, feeling its weight, its contours. Where was she now? All those nights I found myself awake, throwing on some clothes. Inside my car, I cruised through the dead-quiet night streets. Sometimes, the streetlights, or the cold probing lights left on in closed stores, allowed me a glimpse of a huddled shape under a doorway, or … Continue reading A Stone by Debbie Bennett→
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