Category: Nonfiction (Page 1 of 12)

Next Lives

23 March 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Lillian Anderson

We arrange to meet up at this kitschy hole-in-the-wall tiki bar off Victory Boulevard. I haven’t seen Ben in over a decade, but that doesn’t stop me from recognizing him instantly. The contours of his face have changed subtly, more angular perhaps. But then again, so have mine. He’s an apparition from my youth, back when I wore roll-on body glitter and scanned the radio for existential meaning. My middle-aged self is austere by comparison, free of artificial fragrance and parabens and God.

We find a corner booth and discuss what makes this a tiki bar, settling on Polynesian appropriation. I look down at the menu, studying the list of tropical rum-based drinks as if there’d be a pop quiz on it later.

“Why the protective body language?” he asks over the music blaring from a corner speaker. I realize that I’m hugging myself. I drop my shoulders and release the tension that I carry in my pelvic floor, where my physiotherapist tells me women store their stress. I think of being in utero where my mother stored hers, and her mother before her and so on, like a Russian nesting doll.

“This is strange, isn’t it? Life feels like a choose-your-own-adventure book sometimes,” I say, only you can’t go back a chapter when you fall knee deep into quicksand. We could’ve made it in another life.

“It’s weird to be human,” he says, and not for the first time, as we order drinks. Over Mai Tais, he tells me how he scattered his father’s ashes off the coast of Hawaii, making swirling patterns in the ocean with them, even putting some under his tongue.

“Isn’t that carcinogenic?” I ask, somewhat aghast.

“Not in small amounts,” he says evenly, as if consuming our loved ones was entirely natural. I nod in agreement, an ash-eating convert.

I confess that I’m agnostic, but my son believes in reincarnation. “He wants to be a butterfly in his next life,” I say, the way some mothers brag about their kid wanting to be a doctor. “Maybe we all come back as butterflies. Makes as much sense as anything else.” I imagine us resurrected as two delicate insects with paper-thin wings.

I swallow down the last of my drink to temper my nerves, ice clinking against the glass. Ben calls me a primordial attraction, and I balk at this disclosure, my cheeks flushed with embarrassment. He remembers me at sixteen with thick wild hair in a green shift dress. It was purple though, wasn’t it? An iridescent mauve the color of twilight. That’s the thing with memories, they’re malleable like wet clay.

We leave the bar after running out of things to say, our eyes adjusting to the punishing late afternoon sun. Ben reaches for my hand and our fingers interlock as he walks me to my car.

“I always liked your hands,” I say, turning them over to admire them.

“They can’t look the same as they did 20 years ago,” he says.

But they do, I think. We’ve time traveled.

I close my eyes, and I’m a teenager again, sitting on a beach towel in Santa Monica with Ben stretched out beside me, lying prone in the sand wearing red swim trunks. The summer neon sun is reflecting on the waves like shards of shattered glass.

“Walk on my back,” he says.

I let out a nervous laugh. “What? NO!”

“You’re all of what, ninety pounds? Come on, you won’t break me.”

I adjust my bikini and step gingerly onto his lower back, my heart racing. I can feel the topography of his back beneath my bare sandy feet, his skin slipping over muscle and sinew and bone.

I open my eyes to find two grown strangers standing in their place. I steady myself for another goodbye, but no one says it properly anymore. Instead, it’s a truncated bye or see you later or take care, as if people were made of porcelain (aren’t we?). I think of my dead brother and father, whom I never said goodbye to, wondering if I’d eat their ashes too to keep a part of them. Letting go of the living feels riskier, like walking away from a boiling kettle as it sings. Some endings are like that.

Lillian Anderson is an emerging creative nonfiction writer from Los Angeles. Publications include Scary Mommy and Beyond Words Literary Magazine.

Busting Out of My Buster Browns

17 March 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Diana Raab

My mother blamed her ugly feet, laden with bunions and hammer toes, on her pointy shoes worn in the 1940s and 1950s. So, the day I took my very first step she began to obsess about the type of shoes I wore. I vividly remember the day in the 1950s, when she sat me in the back seat of her white Valiant and drove me to the local Buster Brown store in Fresh Meadows, New York. In my little frilly dress, she lifted me onto the platform, six stairs up, to have my feet measured. I remember the measurements to be quite time-consuming and scientific, and consisted of taking numerous measurements of different angles of my feet. The shoe salesman, dressed in a suit and tie, fitted my laced shoes and then ran a mobile x-ray machine over them to make sure my toes lay flat. Looking back I realize the seriousness and professionalism of his job.

From that day onwards and whenever I needed a new pair of shoes, particularly the week before the beginning of school, mother drove me back to the Buster Brown shoe store for a fitting. At school, I was the only girl not permitted to wear slip-on shoes. The week before my sixth grade prom, which I was to attend with Eric, the cutest blonde boy in the grade, I told my mother I wanted my first pair of slip-ons. Against what she called her better judgment, she agreed, but I was permitted to only wear them on that day. Even though I appreciate my mother’s gallant efforts, from that day on, I decided never again to wear laced shoes, except for sports, and became obsessed with slip-ons.

Perhaps because of this childhood trauma, as a young woman, I became obsessed with shoes of every color and style. At twenty-three, I got married and my husband called me Amelda Marcos, who was the First Lady of the Philippines and owned over three thousand pairs of shoes. When we took trips, my suitcase had more shoes than clothes!

Today, we all know that bunions and hammer toes are more related to a family history than to the type of shoes worn, although shoes can exacerbate a preexisting problem. Now in my late sixties, I have to thank my mother’s side of the family for my deformed toes and the bones growing in all different directions. I made the decision a long time ago not to become obsessed with wearing the right shoes. I wanted only beautiful shoes, because it did not matter; genetics would eventually doom me. A few years ago, when we moved into a new house, we had to build extra shelves in my closet, to accommodate every style and color shoe. Thanks, mom, for turning your obsession into my deep passion for shoes.

Diana Raab, MFA, PhD, is a memoirist, poet, workshop leader, thought-leader and award-winning author of fourteen books. She frequently writes on writing for healing and transformation. Her newest book is Hummingbird: Messages from My Ancestors, a memoir with reflection and writing prompts (Modern History Press, 2024). Visit her at https://dianaraab.com/.

Reminiscence

8 March 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Kandi Maxwell

My mother’s fingernails are perfectly painted a deep shade of red. She sits upright in her maroon leather recliner, a soft white pillow on her lap. Sunlight filters in through the sliding glass doors near the kitchen in her Southern California home. Outside are roses, geraniums, begonias. A small, green-grass lawn. I sit beside my mother. It’s lunchtime. Today, her caregiver has made a pretty plate of Wheat Thin crackers, each topped with cottage cheese and a dab of ruby-red strawberry jam in the center.

With her left hand, my mother holds her plate on top of the pillow. She uses her right hand to daintily pinch her thumb and forefinger on the edges of a cracker. Slowly, so slowly and carefully, she lifts the cracker to her mouth. She chews her cracker thoroughly before reaching for another. Her movements are measured, as she savors each bite.

When lunch is over, my mother naps and I chat quietly with my two sisters who are also visiting. The day is tranquil, as we reminisce about our childhoods. My mother, who isn’t really sleeping, occasionally throws her thoughts into the conversation making us laugh. Two days later, I fly back home to Northern California.

Although my mother had been suffering from heart failure, I didn’t know those moments would be our ending. I didn’t know how vividly memories of that scene would evoke my mother’s essence. Even now, four years later, when I miss her and need her familiarity, I picture her brightly painted fingernails; her unhurried manner; her humor. Her gracefulness throughout her physical decline and her strength in confronting mortality.

Kandi Maxwell is a creative nonfiction writer living in Northern California. Her stories have been published in Hippocampus Magazine, KYSO Flash, Raven’s Perch, Wordrunner eChapbooks, and other literary journals and anthologies. Her memoir, Snow After Fire, was released in 2023 by Legacy Book Press. Learn about Kandi’s writing at kandimaxwell.com.

Photo by Linda Briskin (@linda.briskin) from Linda Briskin Photography

Muse

1 March 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Linda Briskin

Muse is elusive. She can be Calliope, the Greek goddess of eloquence. Or Melpomene, the muse of tragedy, or Clio, the goddess of memory. Sometimes she is Urania singing with the stars or Thalia chanting to the ferns as they uncurl in the spring.

The last time I saw Muse, I was trying to meditate while sitting on a rock in densely tangled brush in a Toronto ravine. Rippling water in the creek, filtered summer sun patterning the ground, and spirited bird conversations all distracted. Muse settled beside me, her breath sweet and warm, her eyes closed, our shoulders suddenly touching. She was humming. I joined her and together we offered a melody to the trees.

Perhaps I first met Muse in the library in a small white church perched on a hill, not far from my school in Montréal. I was eight. She was dressed as a librarian—brown tweed skirt, sensible shoes, glasses on a string. She never scolded me for surrounding myself with teetering piles of books in the far back corner. We didn’t really talk, but she saw me, her gaze intent as if she knew and approved of my obsession with words, my passion for stories, my delight in smoothing the cover of a new book. She always saved one for me: an invitation to a place where I could
disappear and perhaps find myself. A gift.

Decades passed and Muse has always been a presence, if inconstant and capricious. Sometimes I catch a trace of her in a discarded twist of striped ribbon, or a child sitting absolutely still on the stairs of a shabby house with a bright blue door. Perhaps a hint of her in an envelope decorated with elaborate calligraphy and abandoned on a park bench. Or in the reflections of clouds and trees in pools of water after a storm.

I’m certain I glimpsed her one summer while kayaking on Stony Lake. Although difficult to discern through the sun’s brightness, Muse seemed to float casually in the air, enveloped in almost translucent gossamer. Tantalizing, just at the edge of my awareness. Then she was in the water: a mermaid, her scales sleek, her locks glistening, her arms reaching out. Remember, her look instructed.

I do remember a dullish day in the interstice between fall and winter on a rare trip on the Toronto subway. I caught her reflection in a window. Her red felt cap had a peacock feather tucked in the brim, swaying with the clickety-clack of the wheels. Inspired, I wrote:

Lucy unearths the red felt cap carefully wrapped in tissue from a hatbox buried in the back of her great-aunt Mary’s closet. Mary was a milliner in her youth and made hats in her small store on St. Denis. Why did she keep this one, Lucy wondered.

No glimpse of Muse, not for many months now, not since the encounter in the ravine. But today at a gathering of writers, where I sit deep in a corner, she is suddenly perched on a stool next to me, vibrating with an energy both compelling and irritating. She is twirling her long braid—an annoying habit. She turns to me with an eager smile. “What’s your favourite word?” she asks.

“About you?” I reply, my voice curt, my stare hostile. “Unpredictable, fleeting, evanescent, temperamental, unstable, erratic, fanciful, transient, provocative, obstinate, uncompromising. You’re a shadow in a dark room, a slight movement in the wind, a musical note at the edge of what’s audible.”

Are you elusive because I bore you? The thought flits through my mind. I want you to be an enduring whisper in my ear, at my service. Constancy, loyalty—all that the world is not. I’m suddenly wild with urgency and desire. Then I start to laugh, hiccupping, almost sobbing. Who doesn’t yearn for such devotion? To be seen and known?

Muse tilts her head toward me, her light blue eyes intent. “Expectations and demands turn me inside out,” she says. “ I sink into silence and splinter into pieces. I’m ephemeral. I delight in winding myself in and around the green shoots of spring. I relish eavesdropping on the conversation at the next table in a café and lying down on a page of text—each letter a fascination. Keep me close, but let me twirl and flutter, and dance to the words I hear. I do whisper in your ear. Listen for it.”

Then we are humming, not quite in tune but together.

Linda Briskin is a writer and fine art photographer. Her CNF embraces hybrid forms, makes quirky connections and highlights social justice themes—quietly. As a photographer, she is intrigued by the permeability between the remembered and the imagined, and the ambiguities in what we choose to see. @linda.briskin and https://www.lindabriskinphotography.com/.

Hold and Release

7 February 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Tracey Ciccone Edelist

I am floating on top of a smooth blue sky with dappled clouds that break apart with each dip of the paddle. When the wind picks up, the sky in the lake becomes partially obstructed by privacy glass ripples, obscuring both sky above and underwater life below. Gliding further south, the ripples swell, and now I’m riding dark molten silver waves, the paddleboard gently rocking across the undulating liquid metal. I expect the paddle to drip silver-plated out of the water, but the splashes on my feet are clear and wet. Entering a small bay where the sun peeks through tree canopies, the water becomes like an oil spill, smooth and slick iridescence. I listen to the rustle of the trees as blue jays flit from branch to branch just above the water, breathing in the earthy smell of the damp bank and the leaves lying in varying layers of decomposition on the forest floor. As I drift away from the shoreline, the faint hint of a bonfire wafts through the air and I see a wispy plume of white smoke rising from a cottage clearing across the lake.

Sitting on the silver waves ahead, I see the young loon I’ve watched grow all summer, enjoying an independent swim. The sun reflects brightly off her long beak, not yet having turned black. She startles when she sees me and dives underwater. When she pops back up seconds later, she’s still close. She is almost fully grown, but her feathers haven’t changed from baby gray to the signature black and white adult markings, and she hasn’t yet earned her white necklace. She disappears again and I wait for her to surface. One minute, then two minutes.

Just as I’m wondering where mama loon could be, she swiftly swims to the place from which her loonlet has disappeared. Mama dunks her head below the water’s surface, searching the dark depths for her chick. She raises her head back up to scan across the lake, calls out loudly, and dunks again. I too continue scanning the lake. At last, the chick appears a few feet away and mama and baby swim quickly toward one another, baby bumping up against mama’s breast. The loonlet makes herself as small as she can on top of the water, scrunching her body down close to the surface near mama, hoping I can’t see her, but I can.

I remember how our youngest daughter took a few weeks after birth to unfurl her body from the position she held in my uterus. Born a couple weeks early, I imagined she’d rather be back in her confined amniotic home, riding the waves of my body, than out here in the open where air hit her skin and filled her lungs, and where she had to learn to feed herself from my breast. She wailed to be held at all times, heart to heart, eyes pinched shut, in protest against the vastness of this outside world. Holding her tiny compact body with curved back, arms and legs folded and tucked in tightly toward her center, was like holding a roly-poly hedgehog curled in on itself. We called her Scrunchie, until she began to relax her legs and straighten out her backbone.

Now she stands taller than me, straight-spined, long arms and legs swinging freely in the world she explores on her own. I find solace on the lake, and call her to me when she strays too far for too long.

Tracey Ciccone Edelist has a PhD in social justice education and is a critical disability studies researcher and educator. She had a previous career as a speech-language pathologist, and then as a fine chocolate entrepreneur. Now, she’s making sense of life through creative nonfiction.

Lies and Happy Chickens

25 January 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Robert Wright

At the turn of the last century, they came to Oregon from Italy to start new lives. They labored in the fields of Southeast Portland. With Italian roots from my immigrant grandparents on my mother’s side, I grew up in this area.

The Italians’ culture and traditions were reflected in their recipes. My grandmother and mother could cook with the best of them: ravioli, lasagna, minestrone, meatballs with spaghetti smothered in mushroom-tinted Bolognese sauce – and Lies.

I was fascinated watching my mother prepare Lies. With a rolling pin she made a thin pasta sheet, pasta sfoglia, from sugar-sweetened dough. She cut away inch-wide strips about six inches long and cut a lengthwise short slit down their centers to make her signature Lies. One end of the dough strip was folded and loosely pulled through the slit resulting in a loop resembling a bow. They were a holiday treat at Christmas time.

Floating on the surface of deep hot oil, the puffed bows became crisp, airy and slightly brown. Then, fished out, while still hot, they were laced with powdered sugar looking like they had been dusted by winter snow. A bowl filled with Lies was often the centerpiece of our dining room table where friends and family gathered during the holidays.

These thin crispy powdered-sugar treats were linguistically linked to an unfortunate pervasive part of human nature: lying. In Italy, lies are called Chiacchiere, for chit-chat, light bits of possibly untruthful, sweetly anticipated gossip.

A flock of Rhode Island Reds lived in a chicken coop out back. I gathered their eggs or fed them vegetable and fruit scraps from the kitchen. The chickens pitched right in and eventually became the central part of my mother’s recipes: Pollo alla Cacciatora, Pollo alla Parmigiana, and crisp fried chicken. In the interim, they were happy unknowing creatures, made all the happier one year, indirectly, by Christmas Lies.

Across the street lived the Okamoto family. They settled there following their forced removal from Portland to Minidoka War Relocation Center in Idaho during World War II. The wounds and racial suspicions from the war healed slowly. One Christmas holiday season my mother decided to help with the healing process. She prepared a large batch of Lies. I accompanied her to deliver the gift. She held the big bowl and knocked on the door. A short, polite Japanese woman answered: Mrs. Okamoto. Of course, they knew each other. But this was special. With a customary slight bow and a smile, she reached out and accepted the Lies and my mother’s holiday intent.

The following evening, I heard a knock on our door; there stood Mrs. Okamoto. Again, there was a slight bow as the gift from the Okamoto family was held out to my mother. The plate was covered with wax paper that hid the gifts underneath. My mother reached out and accepted it with sincere thanks. Mrs. Okamoto left having contributed to neighborly healing. My mother put the plate on our kitchen table for the unveiling; it felt like we were opening a Christmas present.

The array of Japanese handmade edibles was beautiful. Short cylinders of white rice, about the size of small round tuna fish cans, were wrapped around their sides with black dried seaweed. On the center of each rice cake was a small cluster of raw reddish something. We all looked at each other, then at the rice cakes, then at each other, then at the rice cakes. Finally, my mother nibbled at the seaweed edge and wrinkled her mouth, then took a bite out of the center. She knitted her brows and pursed her lips. My father and older brother were next with the same reaction. Watching their expressions, I hesitated, then summoned up all the young tastebud courage I had and gave it a go. The taste was certainly different, far different than Lies or my favorite ravioli.

Without further ado, the plate of rice cakes found a home in our refrigerator to possibly tempt us in the days ahead. There were no takers. European and Asian palates and eating habits were different. For us, the rice cakes were an acquired taste. We lacked patience for this acquisition.

Finally, following my mother’s instruction, I unceremoniously dumped the rice cakes on the ground in the fenced chicken yard. The hens ran over fully expecting kitchen scraps and didn’t hesitate. They pecked and pecked and devoured everything; rice, seaweed, red something, and all. They clucked and clucked. The colorful rooster watched over his feasting hens, stretched his neck up and crowed. They were happy chickens.

In the following days, there was careful questioning. We didn’t want to offend and learned that the red something was raw octopus. We lied, and said we enjoyed the rice cakes. Rarely, lying sometimes can be for greater good.

After an Air Force career, Robert Wright took to writing in his retirement years and capitalized on his extensive life experience. He has self-published: You’ve Got Rocks (anthology of memoirs); The Brass (non-fiction, famous pub in Portland, Oregon); 3FTx – Timed Terror (fiction, suspense/terror); Nudging Nyame (hard science fiction, suspense/thriller).

Cookies with Grandson

4 January 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Rusty Evans

I spent some time with my grandson the other morning talking about trucks. He is interested in them, especially the big ones, like bulldozers, dump trucks, and excavators. I told him things I’ve learned about them in my life—like they’re usually yellow and smell like diesel. I know “torque” is essential, but as soon as I brought it up, his eyes darted around the house, settling on the kitchen, where he got up to go. “Cookie,” he explained. I got up, too, figuring our bonding included us doing stuff together, meaning I would have to have a cookie. These are the sacrifices good grandparents make.

The kitchen was messy from yesterday, not that my grandson cared. I told my wife, Grandma, to leave it last night and promised to clean it up first thing tomorrow, which is today. But I didn’t. In my defense, the morning had gotten away from me: My laptop needed charging because it hadn’t been plugged in. I had to refill the paper towel holder from the Costco stash in the garage. And change one of my picks in the football pool for tonight’s game. All important stuff, for sure.

Nevertheless, the clean-up needed to happen before she returned from running errands. To remind me of that, I put it with an asterisk on top of my daily “to-do” list—*clean-up kitchen. Then, I slid the list under a stack of magazines. No worries—take magazines to recycling bin was on there too. The funny thing is, clean inside of recycling bin was also a “to-do,” way further down the list.

As we ate our cookies together, it occurred to me that I hadn’t thought about any of those pressing duties since listing them. I may have subconsciously or unconsciously (or both) avoided them all morning. You see, I’ve been in the moment. I’ve only thought about what’s inside the little circle around me, which includes this growing, living masterpiece of a child. Maybe I had achieved what had alluded me my entire adult life: Mindfulness. Meet my personal Dalai Lama, my Grandson. To think he’s not even two years old yet.

Being mindful hasn’t been difficult with him around. If I’m living in the now, how could I sweep the garage when there’s a poopy diaper to change? Or power wash the deck when my Grandson wants me to read “Goodnight Moon?” I suppose I could see if he’ll read the updated medicare handbook instead to satisfy a to-do. Even if he agrees, I’m not sure you can do two things simultaneously and remain in the moment.

The fact these tasks aren’t getting done proves I’m more concerned with my grandson’s safety and development than any silly, outdated, written “to-do” list. That stack of Corelle in the sink might signify something good. Of course, if I try to justify its continued existence after my wife gets home, I might have to check off another to-do: put clean sheets on bed in spare room.

My Grandson offers no judgment. Others have told me my head is often in the clouds, and I sometimes don’t see what’s right in front of me. But it’s different with him. My head’s on straight and attached to my body, firmly on solid ground (mop floor), often surrounded by my grandson’s Hot Wheels collection. I now know how Gandhi might have felt sitting all cross-legged in silence. Except in my case, I was listening to little metal cars crashing into one another.

If he notices my occasional wandering mind, he never lets on or says a word. I’m betting my great-guru grandson respects how I generally walk with eyes wide open. It’s fulfilling yet exhausting, neither of which I expected to feel at this age. After all, I’d finally reached a point in my life where I had earned the right to NOT pay attention.

Maybe the Buddha belly (do 3x :10 planks) I developed when I got older was a good sign. Indeed, the karma from spending time with my grandson has unexpectedly brought enlightenment. It could be my morning caffeine kick-in or something more substantial: Nirvana. I am unconcerned about anything outside our interaction during our time together.

I’m at peace today, and one with my future, even knowing it includes completing a few of those “to-dos.” My grandson has expressed to me that he is good with this. Just as long as at the top of my list, with an asterisk, is: *Cookies with Grandson.

Rusty Evans was a husband first, then a Dad, and finally a Grandpa. He hopes the trend continues. He lives and writes on the Central Coast of California.

A How-To Guide on Decorating Our Christmas Tree

12 December 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Andrea Figueroa-Irizarry

Look for the gardening gloves in the garage. There will be three pairs, and one has a hole in the palm where needles can enter. Your stepdad will usually volunteer to take that one.
Wrap your arms around the middle of the tree once it’s halfway off the back of the truck. Lift with your legs.
Walk it across the yard and through the front door. Some needles will scrape off the doorframe. Your mom will already be ready with the broom.
Your sister will hold the stand steady while you and your stepdad right the tree and lower it in. There will be four screw bolts on the sides—turn them clockwise until the metal connects with the trunk. Don’t stand up right away, though, as you might need to readjust until your mom and sister deem the tree straight enough.
Decide between two tree skirts. (You’ll always choose the red one.) Connect the Velcro on either side of the stand.
In the blue tub marked X-Mas Lights, you’ll find string lights bundled around a dozen paper towel rolls. Plug one into the wall. Once you find one that works, hold each end on your index fingers and follow your mom as she weaves the green cables through the branches. Start from the top. Be ready to bring the next roll.
Put the fragile ornaments near the top and the wooden ones near the bottom. The dogs will start to sniff the needles as Mom sweeps them; their nose will bring them to the bottom row of branches, and their wagging tails will likely knock a few down.
Most of the ornaments came from your grandparents, your mom will say. Some of them, like the brassy cherubs playing on lyres or the crystalline doves in mid-flight, will be pointed out more than others. Care for these the most.
End with the ornaments in the red and white boxes. One is dated for your parents’ wedding anniversary. Another shows a soccer ball and two hanging cleats from middle school. Two more have a cap and gown for you and your sister. You will not mean to, but the ones for the dogs will go up last. You will always make sure to bundle them close together on the tree.
Decide between the tinsel ribbon or the checkerboard ribbon. (You’ll always end up with the tinsel one.) Follow your mom around the tree as she pinches and curls the ribbon around the ornaments.
Place a few more ornaments. Change a few others. Make sure your name is near your sister’s.
Position the dogs under the tree. Take videos and pictures. They will move, and most of the photos will be blurry, but when you look back on those moments, you will hear your family’s laughter blend with the holiday music in the background.

Andrea Figueroa-Irizarry was born in Puerto Rico and raised with a North Florida accent. She writes fiction and nonfiction about mental health, family, and relationships, and she is currently studying for her MFA at the University of South Florida. When not writing, she can be found cuddling her basset hound.

Nana’s Christmas Cactus

4 December 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by MD Bier

We were always visiting my grandparents. Pop Pop grew roses. Nana grew Christmas cactuses. Every spring and summer they appeared. They took over the breezeway. These long, small white containers a couple of inches high filled with Christmas cactus on every available shelf and open space. They grew so viney draping to the floor.

In winter, they mysteriously disappeared. Vanished. The breezeway too cold for them. Unheated, they would have shivered and died. Don’t know where Nana put them in winter. No one remembers them blooming at Christmas or being displayed on the hutch, coffee tables, or end tables. Every spring they reappeared like magic taking up the same amount of space as the previous summer.

Two of my younger sisters asked Nana for her Christmas cactus. She gave them a few pieces to take home. Those few pieces grew into a huge Christmas cactus. Each sister has pieces of the original and grew their own Christmas cactus. They are now old. Forty, fifty years old. The original older than that. Blooming year after year. Becoming more beautiful the older they get. Elegance in aging.

She has well-grounded roots. No prickly points. Smooth, dark green leaves. Growing high. Bushy. Numerous strands of stems and leaves, some trailing. The oldest stems thick and woody. Not really a cactus. She loves dappled sunlight and lots of talking.

When the birds fly south in September, it’s lights out at five o’clock. A few months of the year, Planty likes it cool and dark so she blooms for Christmas. It’s her winter. Once the first buds appear and as the first double petaled fuchsia flowers blossom, we tell her she’s gorgeous.

Pop Pop’s roses need lots of water, and Nana’s Christmas cactus needs little.

My Nana was low maintenance like the Christmas cactus. Not fussy or prickly. Well grounded. Spunky. Her Irish skin burned in the sun just like her Christmas cactus. Pro anything Irish. Worked hard. Cooked holiday dinners, not everyday dinners. College-educated, well-read, artist extraordinaire. Wished I had asked for her art books. Her vision grew thick and woody like her Christmas cactus stems, and we saw less and less of her after my Pop Pop passed away. Their charm couldn’t charm the grief away. Nowadays, even though Nana is long gone, she showers all our cactuses with her magic, ensuring they bloom beautifully at Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter. Extremely healthy. Age defying. I don’t think when Nana gave my sisters those few pieces of Christmas cactus, she ever expected them to live, let alone create five other plants miraculously still living over half a century later.

MD Bier is a binge reader and always has book. Her writing reflects her passion for social change and social issues. She is part of several writing communities where she writes and studies. She’s published in various literary journals. She resides in NJ with her family and dog.

fresh peaches on brown woven basket — Photo by Mariam Antadze on Pexels.com

Lazy Man’s Pie

22 November 2024 / Editor

Nonfiction by Marilyn Paolino

What was Lazy Man’s Pie?

Just the other day, I was skimming the Beechwell cookbook, whose thirty-eight yellowed pages easily fit in my palm, when I spotted this pie with a friendly name. Lazy Man’s Pie shared the page with the French cherry and old-fashioned lemon pies.

The recipe looked familiar—except for the name and the stick of oleo. Oleo margarine was popular in the 1950s when Cooking Favorites of the Beechwell Community was probably published. The cookbook came from Aunt Judy’s attic. Before moving, she sent me several boxes packed with family photos, records, and journals dating back to the early 1900s.

Of course! Lazy Man’s Pie was our family’s famous fruit cobbler, I thought.

Dessert first. (Then back to my family project.)

I had a habit of reading cookbooks from back to front, starting with basic bars, cakes, and cookies. Eager to experiment in the kitchen, I began baking when I was nine or ten years old. Dad and I baked together on Sunday afternoons. Nothing fancy. I chose a cake box mix from lemon, white, and orange flavors that Dad liked best.

But we made cobbler from scratch. The recipe was forgiving, unlike pies that required practice to produce crusts with a delectable duo of texture and taste.

My parents were forgiving, loving people. During lunch celebrating their 50^th wedding anniversary, my brother and I asked them what the secret was to a happy marriage.

“There is no secret. It’s hard work,” Mom said, without hesitation.

Her answer left us to reflect on our own relationships. My brother married his high-school sweetheart, and I wed my soul mate decades later. My parents were strong role models who during their sixty-two years together treated one another with respect. They made married life look easy.

Yet, family relationships were often fraught. I heard the hurt in Mom’s voice, some thirty years ago, when she told me my aunt and uncle opposed their marriage. They did so under a loving guise because they served as my father’s guardian, raising him as a son after both his parents died.

Dad’s childhood lacked sweetness because he was orphaned at eight years old. Maybe that’s why as an adult, he craved sweets like fudge, pudding, cakes, and ice cream.

During the holidays, we made a rich chocolate fudge. We relied on the Fannie Farmer recipe, which called for a can of sweetened condensed milk (large) and four and a half cups of sugar.

However, ice cream was an every day treat for Dad. He heaped a generous glob of vanilla ice cream in his oatmeal and a tablespoon in his morning coffee. Usually, he ate a healthy diet, but kept a tub of “cheap” ice cream in the freezer. He lived for 89 years.

Mom grew up during World War II, an era of waste not, want not. She abided by the rule, making sure she ate food before it spoiled. In our house the running after-supper joke was, “Can this leftover be saved?” Yes, and the dish returned to the fridge. Anyone who raised doubts took a spoon and ate the last bites. Either way, we saved the food.

Before the family cookbook arrived, Mom and I had made cobbler after receiving more peaches than we could eat. Mom recited the recipe with ease: one stick of butter, one cup each of flour and sugar, a tablespoon of baking powder, a pinch of salt, and one cup of milk. We preheated the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit and melted the butter in the 9 x 13 glass baking dish.

Eager to get baking, we lined up the blemished to bruised fruit on the counter. We washed the fruit and removed the pits. I sucked off the flesh from the pits and thought, waste not, want not. We didn’t bother to blanch and peel the soft peaches whose sticky ripeness covered the counter and dripped from our hands.

In a large bowl, I measured and mixed the ingredients, and poured the cake-like batter over the butter. I plopped the cinnamon-sprinkled peaches in the middle of the pan. Do not stir, that was the secret. I confess, I’m tempted to swirl the fruit around, but learned to trust what I’ve lovingly prepared. Cobbler always tasted better when I used fresh fruit from the farmer’s market. But I have used store-bought canned fruit to satisfy my craving.

In my kitchen, I chose the modest cobbler over pie because it’s welcome at every meal and won’t let me down.

People who claim it’s “as easy as pie” probably haven’t made one. In my hands, crust turned tough and chewy or soggy as if the fruit itself sobbed into the dough. My lattice came out lopsided. And my fruit slicing, layering, and arranging skills lacked pie-filling appeal.

As we cleaned the kitchen, I tried to recall the last time dad and I made cobbler. We used canned cherries swimming in thick syrup.

I checked on the cobbler in the oven as the scent of cinnamon filled the house. About forty minutes later, we had a bubbling, burbling celebration of fresh fruit. I cut a fresh-from-the-oven-corner chunk for each of us and added vanilla ice cream. The Lazy Man’s Pie, with its golden brown, bumpy crust and juicy peach filling, was easy to make, true to its name. We saved the jammy middle for the next day.

Warm cobbler topped with a dollop of ice cream takes me back to my childhood baking days those Sunday afternoons, savoring unmeasured lazy time—simple, sweet, and easy. Dad couldn’t have any cobbler with us that day, but he passed down his recipe for a joyful life: work hard, share love, and forgive all.

Marilyn Paolino is a writer who collects family stories and cookbooks. She had a career in public relations before leaving to write full time. Early in her career, she was a newspaper reporter who accepted all the leftover assignments. She lives in the Philadelphia area.