Category: Nonfiction (Page 1 of 13)

Lessons Woven in Time

1 November 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Ron Theel

We learn by doing, and experiences can be great teachers.

Don’t get too comfortable as your life can change quickly.

One winter, we had an unusually warm early March. Everyone hoped for an early spring. A bitter cold front suddenly swooped in, bringing with it sleet and freezing rain. While walking my dog, I came across two robins, their backs frozen to the sidewalk, feet sticking up in the air. The promise of early spring vanished overnight.

Follow your heart and your passion.

One of my college roommates, Ben, was a gifted viola player. Ben wanted to pursue a career in music, but his father insisted that he enroll as a pre-med student. He became disinterested in his coursework and dropped out at the end of his sophomore year. Several years passed until one day I received a letter from Ben. He graduated from the Royal College of Music in London and was making plans to audition for the London Symphony. Always remember that your life is your journey.

Travel as much as you can. It will change the way you view the world.

I’ve been to China five times. Billions of people don’t live the same way we do and don’t share the same beliefs, values, and way of life that we do. You will realize what a tiny speck we occupy in the world and be grateful for the things we do have in America.

I do have some regrets. I wish I had been more of a “free spirit” earlier in life. On a beautiful morning, it’s okay to hit your “pause button.” Grab today. Spend a day at the beach. Hike in the forest. Claim your day. It belongs to you and to no one else. It took a progressive, incurable disease for me to realize this. No one is guaranteed tomorrow.

Don’t get trapped in the past. Be a forward-thinking, lifelong learner. I wish I had kept more current with our ever-changing technology and made more of an effort to adapt to an ever-changing world. Changes come so fast. Moving forward in life is about adaptation.

Remember that your life is your journey. Be sure to make the most of it!

Ron Theel is a freelance writer, photographer, and mixed media artist living in Syracuse, NY. His writing has appeared in The Bluebird Word, The RavensPerch, Beyond Words, and elsewhere.

Marie’s Wings

14 October 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Kandi Maxwell

“I want to fly,” my four-year-old granddaughter, Marie, says. “Me too,” I say. We’re watching a My Little Pony video. Some of the ponies fly. Her favorite is Rainbow Dash, a blue Pegasus with a rainbow-colored mane and tail. The pony’s wings are small, but Rainbow Dash can fly fast. Marie loves fast.

She also loves other real or imagined creatures with wings: birds, butterflies, and fairies. Marie is mesmerized by red-breasted robins or blue-bodied stellar’s jays as they flutter from tree to tree in my forest home. I watch as Marie runs beneath them clapping her hands, saying, “fly, fly.” Marie is also fascinated by the butterflies that hover over our lilac and rosemary bushes. She has a little green butterfly net, and occasionally she will capture one. Because of her autism, she’s speech delayed, but she makes happy sounds in her own language. She gently brushes her finger across one of the wings. I notice how the light catches the wings, creating a sparkling shimmer. After inspecting the butterfly, we find a place to re-home it in the large half-barrel filled with lavender, lemon balm, and thyme.

Later, on a trip to Mount Shasta, I find a little store that sells children’s red monarch butterfly wings made of a soft, light fabric. The winged cape has straps around the shoulders and loops around the wrists, allowing Marie to open and close the wings, her movements mimicking a butterfly. Back at my home, she dashes through the yard flapping her arms. “I’m flying, I’m flying,” she says. For a while, those wings are her favorite accessory. She wears her bright red cape everywhere we go.

Less than a year after I buy the wings, they are destroyed in the 2018 Paradise Camp Fire, along with her other cherished toys. In the years that follow the fire, Marie brings three grocery bags filled with her new special toys anytime she leaves home. She fears losing the things she loves, the purple dragon she had saved from the fire, her new little ponies, her fox, and kitten plushies.

Marie just turned twelve. She now has a good vocabulary with her own unique communication style, but talking about emotions is difficult. We don’t talk about the fire or the loss of her former home. But I know she’s had some healing. She no longer needs to bring three bags of toys when she visits, but the purple dragon always travels with her. And she still has the butterfly net.

On her latest visit, she captures a tiny, lustrous green frog. Marie tenderly holds it in her hand, while we walk it over to the half-barrel of herbs where she sets it free. Afterwards, she runs off with her net searching for butterflies through the soft spring grasses and up in the branches of the flowering apple trees. As I watch her run, I think about the traumas she’s faced at such a young age—the fire, numerous moves, COVID, and missed school years. The losses have been difficult, but like the butterflies, Marie soars. “Fly, Fly,” I say.

Kandi Maxwell is a creative nonfiction writer who lives in Northern California. Her stories have been published in Hippocampus Magazine, Bright Flash Literary Review, The Meadow, The Raven’s Perch, and many other literary journals and print anthologies. Learn more about Kandi’s writing at kandimaxwell.com.

Early Harvest

8 October 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Margaret Morth

The print date on the black-and-white’s border says “Aug 60,” and that might well be spot on. Film processing was an extra cost in a household that afforded no extras, and our family photos were taken with deliberation, usually by my father. A roll of film could sit in the camera for quite some time. But here the corn is far enough along that I’m checking it for ripeness, so I’ll call it: late July-early August 1960. At that time in northern plains summer when everyone’s taste buds hum in anticipation of the first steaming platter of yellow-gold corn on the cob.

I hadn’t considered before who took the photo. But now it seems obvious that it was my brother, two years my senior, using the little “Brownie” camera that had mostly replaced the bulky, fussy flash cameras of our 1950s photos, birthdays and Christmas. Dad didn’t want us handling anything that could break or get mussed up, but the Brownie—casual, inexpensive, ubiquitous in its time—was of another, easier-going state of being. And my brother, longer-schooled in how not to upset our father, had access to this companionable camera, and took it out into our little world.

My father and I, together on a summer day. That sounds simple, ordinary enough. Though for us this is a singular moment, and that it was caught out of time is extraordinary too.

I am a month shy of my seventh birthday. My long French braids are pinned up in the warmth of summer. Already evident are the long arms and large hands, mark of the big-boned paternal line that bred me. It’s hard to see, but my father is smiling slightly, maybe talking about the ear of corn I’ve singled out. My face is hidden but the set of my head and my hands about to enfold the chosen ear show an intentness, a seriousness about something important to get right. Dad looks relaxed, pleased even. That in itself makes this a moment apart.

It must have been a Sunday, otherwise he wouldn’t have been with us in the middle of the day and not in work clothes. Still, it seems notable that he’d spend his brief time of leisure with us like that, just hanging out. Maybe that’s why my brother snapped the shutter. Aware of rarity, he documented it.

Throughout my childhood and beyond, “relaxed” was not a word often connected with my father. Later in life I realized that he, like his siblings and parents, struggled with what people didn’t have words for back then. Moody, they’d say, nervous. He’s such a nervous one. That tribe are all moody, you know. The hounds of anxiety and depression stalked them throughout their lives and passed into generations.

But not on this summer day in 1960. I can almost hear him, his voice low and easy: That’s a nice one, peel a little from the top, just a peek. No wonder I was so intent, almost reverent.

Dad is wearing his American Legion T-shirt, white with dark blue accents. Years later I found the shirt in a drawer, long packed away. I asked Dad if I could have it. He seemed surprised but said sure, take it. It was worn pretty thin by then but still up for the beer runs, impromptu volleyball games, and happy hour bars of college life. It had a good second run. I wish I had it now, even the remaining tatters of it.

Since retiring from a career in the nonprofit sector, Margaret Morth is immersed in a long-held passion for writing. Her work has appeared in Under the Sun, The RavensPerch, and TulipTree Review. Originally from North Dakota, she resides in Brooklyn NY, her adopted home of many years.

Railroad Run

1 September 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Dick Daniels

My favorite race tee came from the Amory Railroad Festival Run. Bright orange and black, which happened to be my college colors, the front displayed a grinning locomotive chugging down the tracks in running shoes. Whenever worn, it stood out and drew favorable comments from other runners.

The shirt has long since gone the way of so many other articles of clothing: either victimized by my laundering inadequacies; passed down to one of my three sons; or packed in a grocery sack for donation to a local charity. However, my memories of that race day remain—as vivid as the orange of that shirt.

Amory didn’t have the appeal of other Mississippi towns like Natchez, Oxford, or even neighboring Tupelo. If Elvis had been born about twenty miles further south, that tee might have had a different face. But Amory had given birth to a thriving rail center, and that was the part of its history around which it created a festival every spring.

I was living in Memphis at the time and Amory was only a two-hour drive. The race brochure was particularly inviting—something for the whole family. Train rides on authentic railroad cars! Merchandise drawings! Colorful t-shirts! And the unstated possibility to a man nearing forty that he might have a chance for an age-group trophy at the small-city event. In those days, I eagerly journeyed to such out-of-town races as the Okraland Stampede and the Trenton Teapot Trot. The idea of accumulating more race shirts than you could ever wear had not occurred to me.

So off we went, my wife and youngest son along for the festivities. The sun came up early that late-spring day. Its warmth was particularly soothing after so many cold and dreary days of winter. The temperature eventually reached about 85 degrees, which doesn’t sound all that scary to a Southern runner. It was, however, the first day that year of any significant heat, and I would later calculate that it was nearly 30 degrees warmer than the average temperature at which I had been training just a few weeks prior.

As we gathered at the starting line, a quick survey of the field indicated a supreme effort might indeed result in age group recognition. For some reason, the actual start caught most of us by surprise, and there was an excessive amount of chaos and jostling for position as startled runners surged ahead. I remember seeing a young boy of ten or eleven who lost one of his shoes in the ensuing panic. He fought to retrieve it without being trampled by the herd of thinclads, then wisely retreated to the safety of the sidelines to lace up. A Stage Mom shrieked at him the whole time, ‘Hurry! You’re going to be last!’ Mercifully, I was soon out of earshot and had some running space.

The Amory Run, as I recall, was a five-miler, and I expected it to be less demanding than all those 10Ks which were the standard race at that time. My split times were pretty good the first two miles, but it was soon painfully apparent that I was overheating. I could visualize wavy vapors coming off the top of my head. That sinking feeling of knowing that you had ‘gone out too fast’ slowly overtook me. A mile later the disgrace of stopping to walk during a race had to be endured. It was my first time, and it was humbling. But I knew there was no other choice.

With each person that passed me, I suffered a little more as runners with excess weight or without the smoothest strides went streaming by. There were even children passing me. Among them, I recognized the boy who had lost his shoe at the start. His labored breathing had been audible before I saw him. As he went by, I could see a face flushed as red as a warning light on a car’s dashboard, similarly indicating an impending boilover. In that instant, I imagined how he might be struggling to gain his mother’s approval, thought about my own upbringing and how achievements had been expected by my parents, and knew how proud I would have been to see one of my sons showing that much determination.

Before he got too far ahead, I broke into a half-sprint to catch up, resolved to help him finish. I pulled up beside him and asked if he minded some company. His breathing was so heavy, words could not be summoned, so a shake of his head was my invitation. Over the remainder of that course, he became the recipient of all the information I had ever read on breathing, relaxation and pace. ‘Hold what you got!’ was encouragingly repeated.

My own pain and humiliation had been forgotten, and before I knew it, we had turned a corner and entered a long parking lot that housed the finish line at its other end. The resilience of youth and the shouts of Amory citizens lining the course spurred him to sprint the final straightaway, and I watched him proudly as he exuberantly pulled away with arms and legs flailing. When I finally came up behind him in the chute, he uttered his first words as he turned and looked up to me, ‘Thanks, Mister!’ I nearly cried. To borrow from Charles Dickens, “it was the worst of times” I ever ran, but “the best of times” I ever had running.

Dick Daniels is a combat veteran from Memphis with nonfiction work in Submarine Review and several other military magazines. His fiction pieces, backboned by historical research, have appeared in multiple journals, including Alabama Literary Review, Hare’s Paw, Wilderness House, Cardinal Sins, Valley Voices, and Two Thirds North.

Fallen Hearts

1 September 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Angie Sarhan Salvatore

The hearts drifted from the sky that October, cascading much like snowflakes or teardrops do. Though I requested them, their sight still startled me.

I ask for signs the way people order coffee—without thinking, a habit ingrained over time. Is this the right choice? Show me a sign. Do I say yes? Show me a sign.

This was different. You were gone without goodbye. Desperate for a lifeline, instinct kicked in. Show me a heart if you’re with me, I whispered.

Only three hours later, a heart found me. While I thought the heart might come in the form of a bumper sticker or a billboard while I drove to work, that’s not how you showed up. Instead, the sign came while I walked to my office, shoulders slumped, feet slow, head down. My mind caught up to my eyes a few seconds after I took it in. I turned around to look again. I was shocked, but only for a moment.

I knew if you could, you would send me signs.

Years ago, I visited you at your home in London. I could immediately tell that this place was your heart. You could immediately tell I wasn’t visiting, but rather escaping. I was having an upside down moment in life, and hadn’t figured out how to make it right side up again. You offered me a quiet space to settle and sort things out.

When you asked what I wanted to do on my trip, and I replied I wanted to see a psychic, you didn’t seem surprised. Yes, we would sightsee, and yes, I would fall in love with London returning again and again to stay with you, but the first priority was find someone with answers, since I sure as hell didn’t have any.

I wasn’t sure where you stood with psychics or the afterlife, but as my older cousin, you indulged my request, making an appointment at what I would later find out was a world-famous psychic shop. You accompanied me, which made me feel accepted. I opened up. You understood my need to believe in something beyond me. You understood my need to look for signs.

There I stood, eyes fixed on the beige leaf, misshapen and alone—an offering of hope in the darkness. I picked it up from its stem and it was obvious this folded over leaf was a heart. I choked out a breath. I reached for my phone, took a photo, and gently put the leaf back. Thank you, I said to the sky, to you.

For the rest of the day I regretted not keeping it, not saving it somewhere.

Thankfully, this was the first of many signs to come.

Days collapsed into weeks. The leaves found me, over and over again. These unusual gifts became a trail of breadcrumbs propelling me forward each day, giving comfort and reassurance you were with me. Some bore jagged edges. Others looked like a perfectly crafted cutout, but they all had something in common.

Each fallen heart seemed like a symbol of resilience and I saw reflections of me—torn, scattered, and in full surrender. These delicate offerings felt like tiny miracles, nudges from you reassuring me somehow. I took photos and collected them. I told myself I wanted to preserve the memory, but really I wanted to preserve the proof. I saved them like treasures, tucking them away for safekeeping—tokens to be found sometime in the future, when the leaves might stop appearing or when I needed to be reminded of something more.

In those moments, I saw myself as a woman with a beat up heart, desperately hanging onto beat up heart-shaped leaves, but I didn’t care. Though they didn’t take away the sting of your unshakeable loss, they felt like an elixir to my soul, making the grief more manageable, if only for a moment.

I started painting a small, black heart on my fingernail. All of a sudden, we had a thing going. Death didn’t sever our connection. It just took a new shape.

I went back to London three years after your passing. As I packed to leave, I wondered if I would go by your place, if even to pass it from the outside. The idea simultaneously gutted and lifted me, and so, minutes before I left for the airport I tucked something in my purse.

A place can be a container, filled with a mixture of memories, emotions, and past selves. London held so many versions of me. The sad one. The lost one. The hopeful one. The happy one. It had yet to carry this new version, though. The me-without-you one.

Your son was in town and asked me to come by your place. I think he sensed I needed to be there.

It was exactly as I remembered. The staircase that seemed endless. The artwork you painstakingly picked out, hanging in every possible spot. I thought of how happy you would be that we were there together.

When I had a moment alone, I reached into my purse for my hidden treasure. Your son told me that one day he might have to sell this place, my home away from home. It made sense that I did this then.

I hid a tiny heart-shaped amethyst in the unused fireplace. I placed it with a silent prayer, a thank you for all that you gave me: for your grace, generosity and kindness when I was at my lowest; for your friendship and guidance when I was flailing; and for your faith in me. I thanked you for the signs that still arrive when I need them most.

I doubt that amethyst will ever be found. At least, that’s my hope. I want it to remain in the dark depths of this faraway, sacred spot so that a piece of my heart will always be there, nestled in with a piece of yours.

Angie Sarhan Salvatore is a Writing Professor. Her writing has been featured on The Huffington Post, Tiny Buddha, Positively Positive, Mind Body Green, Rebelle Society, Elephant Journal, Having Time, Herself 360 and her blog: universeletters.com. You can find Angie on social media @universeletters.

The Little Lizard That Could

29 August 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Priscilla Davenport

I’ve spent an hour trying to free the little green lizard. He’s caught between the window glass and the screen. Imagine the gecko you see on TV, but just a baby and in dire straits.

He’s tiny, about two inches long with a tail of similar length. He should be bright green and cavorting among grass and plants, but he has turned a grayish-green camouflage to match the screen he managed to invade but now is trying to escape.

Ideally, the screen is removed by opening the window and punching it out from the inside, but I can’t get the window open. These windows are an aggravation despite their supposed superiority, but they are no match for me today. If I can get the screen bent slightly from the outside, I reason, it will create enough space for the lizard to escape. I take a variety of unorthodox tools to the patio and start trying to bend the screen’s stiff frame. Finally, a garden trowel and a screwdriver prop it open, just enough, at the bottom of the window.

I go inside to watch the lizard work his way to freedom.

He’s at the top of the window. Now moving down the side. Getting closer. There, he’s almost at the opening. Oh no. He stops and works his way back to the top. Does he think the screwdriver and trowel are predators? Speaking of predators, here comes our indoor cat. The lizard’s sides heave after the cat flings himself against the glass. We don’t need this stress. I close the cat in the laundry room.

Back at the window, here comes the little captive again, inching downward. But there he climbs to the top again, and then in a circle. You’re making bad decisions, I tell him. I get it. My mind is a muddle when I’m panicked and battle-weary. But you’re so close. Stop and think. Don’t repeat your defeatist behavior over and over. This is your survival we’re talking about.

If I stop watching, maybe he’ll work it out. Maybe I make him nervous. I’ll come back later and hope he has returned to his rightful reptilian world.

If he’s still trapped, I’ll work on that damn screen again.

One hour later. The lizard is still there, frozen in defeat. You will not die today, I assure him. I take a hammer outside and use the claw to bend the screen’s frame out of its track and into a triangular-shaped escape route a couple of inches at its widest. The trowel and screwdriver drop away.

I go back inside, leaving the tiny creature alone again to figure things out. When I check back, he’s gone. Yes! I pump my fist in celebration and hammer the misshapen frame into a semblance of straight. A hard push gets it back inside the window track.

Six days later. I’m sitting in a patio chair when a lizard startles me by skittering across my lap and jumping to the table at my elbow. This lizard is slightly bigger than the captive. But could it be? How much do lizards grow in a week? The little guy settles on a table leg only inches from my hand, camouflages from green to brownish, and looks at me. I mean, really looks at me, our eyes locking. I talk softly to him, holding his dark eyes with mine. He blinks. I feel as if we understand each other.

He stays, looking around but mostly watching me, until I need to leave ten minutes later. I get up from my chair and turn to say goodbye, but he is gone.

I sit on the patio daily, but my little friend has not returned. An internet search tells me that small lizards like geckos can live for several years even in the wild, so with luck we’ll connect again. I’ll keep an eye out.

Priscilla Davenport has spent a lifetime with words, first as the daughter of an English teacher and later as a journalist and lawyer. Now retired, she spends time writing creatively and supporting animal rescue organizations. A story of hers was shortlisted for the 2023 International Amy MacRae Award for Memoir.

Lying in Wait

1 August 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Jennifer Pinto

My dog, Josie, is barking at the kitchen window, warning me of an intruder. I look out into the front yard expecting to see deer or perhaps a wild turkey but if there is danger out there, I can’t see it. She continues jumping and pawing at the glass so I look outside again, this time glancing downward at the porch situated just below the window. It’s a snake. Its three foot long body is nestled and expertly blended into the wicker of my favorite chair but its head is levitating skyward, peeking into my kitchen window. I think about how many times I sat in that chair oblivious to this danger. This unexpected interloper upends the sense of tranquility and comfort I normally feel in my beautiful yard. I’m not sure I will ever be able to relax out there again.

It’s 2004 and we were sitting at the kitchen table having family dinner when my husband reached for the salt shaker and yelped in pain. He tried to dismiss it as nothing but I knew acknowledging any sort of discomfort was out of character for him so I insisted he make an appointment with the doctor right away. I suspected it might be something as simple as a pulled muscle or a gallstone but I was wrong. This sudden sharp pain in his right side led to a doctor’s visit then an ultrasound and finally a biopsy that confirmed my husband had cancer. Primary liver cancer. The surgeon discovered a baseball-sized mass on his otherwise pristine liver. There were no symptoms, no warning signs. It’s likely these cancer cells were hiding in his body for years until the mass grew large enough to cause pain. I was a young mom with children ages eight, five, and three. It felt like the life I had envisioned had suddenly been turned on its head.

I shoo the snake off the porch with a long handled broom and watch as it slithers into the landscaping and disappears. I spend days searching for holes and researching ways to deter snakes. I eventually return to my chair on the front porch but feel like I’m in a constant state of hypervigilance. One afternoon the mailman comes to my front door with a stack of letters in his hand. I can’t deliver your mail today he says as he pulls out his cell phone and shows me a picture of my mailbox. There is a long black snake slithering up the stones encasing the mailbox and blocking the door. It is the same snake I had seen on my porch and now I’m convinced its home is somewhere close to my own. It will be months before I walk down the wooded path to retrieve the mail without a large stick in my hand.

My husband had a liver resection to remove two thirds of his liver. The healthy portion was expected to regenerate. The pathologist reported that while it hadn’t spread outside of the liver, there was some vascular invasion which meant some cancer cells had escaped into his bloodstream and could be lying in wait to cause a recurrence in another part of his body. There was no way of knowing if the cancer would appear again. I learned how to hope for the best while being prepared for the worst. We signed our children up for “Walking the Dinosaur,” a children’s cancer support group to help them deal with their feelings. My husband coped by buying me a new set of garbage cans with wheels so I could easily bring the trash to the curb and by writing out passwords and instructions for me on how to pay the bills.

The snake is like a shadow that follows me around, a vague yet niggling thought in the back of my mind. So when the HVAC man who is servicing our air conditioning unit knocks on the door and says, Do you know there is a huge black snake in your yard? I just nod and say, I know. He is a burly guy with large tattooed biceps and a long goatee. I’m surprised when he admits the snake is making him jumpy. I am no longer afraid of the snake although I remain vigilant. While I hope I never see it again, I’ve become accustomed to the idea that encountering the snake is always a possibility.

After his liver resection, my husband was scanned every three months for several years. When the scans were eventually put on a yearly schedule, he started to feel confident enough in his health that he allowed me to buy him new shoes and new clothes again. He had refused any purchases until he could be certain he would live long enough to get good use out of them. It’s been twenty years since he was first diagnosed and he remains cancer-free.

Just last week, in our basement, we caught a baby snake in a glue trap meant for mice. I’m horrified that a snake could penetrate our walls and get so close. It prompts me to stay vigilant. I remind my husband he’s due for his next scan.

Jennifer Pinto writes both fiction and creative nonfiction. She has three grown children and lives in Cincinnati with her husband. She enjoys drinking coffee at all hours of the day. Her work has been published in The Citron Review, SunDog Lit, Lunch Ticket, The Bluebird Word and Muleskinner, among others.

Summer’s End

28 July 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Vicki Addesso

for Cathy

It’s now, this evening, and like this summer, I have grown older. Yes, summers grow old, and come to an end. On this last day of August, September’s eve, I sense autumn’s approach.

The mammoth sunflower growing all alone by the young maple tree in front of my house bobs its heavy head and sighs it seems to be getting dark earlier and earlier. It has never seen a summer before, does not know summer must end. Or that this is its last, its one and only. The bulbous center is bursting with fresh sunflower seeds, and come early morning I will watch the goldfinches come to pluck them out, and the bees indulge. The golden-yellow petals are many and flutter in the tiniest of breezes yet remain put. That stem, so thick and straight and tall, sways for the wind in storms and refuses to break. Before the flower at its top bloomed, I thought of Jack and his beanstalk. Could I climb the stem and find a giant in the clouds?

The lonely sunflower, from leftover seeds I dropped next to the baby tree after running out of room in the backyard gardens. Only this one of the dozen or so seeds casually tossed into the dirt grew. The backyard has many other sunflowers, autumn beauties and sunspots and Little Beckas that had bloomed a couple of weeks earlier. Some are still vibrant, others wilting. They will not wither in loneliness; they have one another. But that sunflower out in front of the house, it rips at my heart, knows nothing of its fate. Its single solitary life that will fade as this summer ends. Trees, shrubs, other plants and other creatures share a world in our front yard and have more, some many, summers ahead of them. No worries, sweet sunflower, I whisper through the window screen. After the crispness of fall, the cold of winter, the promise of spring, I will plant more seeds. Summer will return. There will be sunflowers again.

What is this evening for me? It’s crickets. Their sounds fill late summer nights. It is leaving the bedroom curtains open as the sky darkens. Sitting in my quiet room with no lamp lit, listening, watching the light leave. It’s letting the emotions of memories set butterflies to flutter in my belly and goosebumps to rise on my skin. Letting my mind wander and visions to appear. Suddenly I am a child again. Chasing fireflies. Air on so much of my skin, warm, the breeze soft. Swatting at the mosquito on my elbow, sweating, and not caring. Looking back at the house I grew up in, I see the porch light come on. Tilting my head back to glance at the sky, I get dizzy with the sensation of falling up instead of down. Then my mother’s voice calling me inside. I am young but I know it must end.

When did I realize, at what age, did I learn of endings? As a baby, did I notice that the cold of March — the month of my birth —began lifting? That the sun stayed longer, warming my face as my mother pushed me in a stroller? Then, the heat of summer. The slow creeping back of early sunsets. A chill in the air. My first winter. Was I two years old, three, or four when I knew things would come to an end?

When did Eve, that second of the first two human beings, realize that everything was changing? For the first time, one season flowed into another, and nothing was sure any longer. Already banished from the paradise of the Garden of Eden, she now witnessed the utter destruction of all that was familiar. Was she frightened? Or was she too busy to notice? Being mother to the entire human race certainly must have kept her busy.

So amusing how I, and others, even after years of watching our star come and go, shift in the sky, making us alter our clocks, still say, Wow, it’s getting dark so early now, as if it’s something new. As if we were children. As if it were the first time. As if we were sunflowers.

And so, it will happen again, just as it has every year, all the years of my life — the end. These edges of the seasons are my favorite time. The end slides into a beginning. For the time being.

Now I sit, at my desk, the open window in front of me. It is dark outside. The screen of my computer bright. The crickets singing their song of summer’s old age, the sound of it so familiar. The sound of longing. Realization and acceptance. It is the song of ending, reverberating through space and time. It is falling upwards and flying away.

Originally published in The Bluebird Word in February 2024.

Vicki Addesso is co-author of the collaborative memoir Still Here Thinking of You~A Second Chance With Our Mothers (Big Table Publishing, 2013). Publishing credits include: Gravel Magazine, Barren Magazine, The Writer, Sleet Magazine, Dorothy Parker’s Ashes, and more. She was nominated for a 2023 Pushcart Prize.

Life and Love as Seen Through My Plum Tree

7 July 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Michele Tjin

The delicate popcorn balls of flowers have appeared again, the herald of a new season. The arrival seems earlier each year.

The plum tree was already a mature specimen when we moved into this house. That first July, one of the first things we did was to pick up the rotting fruit off the ground. I whispered to the tree and my pregnant belly that in a year or two, there would be small hands to help harvest the fruit.

How does this tree of the family Prunus salicina know when to emerge from winter and make slivers of leaves and dainty blooms?

How do I know when to kick off this curtain of chaos and confront hard issues, difficile confligit?

Other signs of life and hope in my backyard: tiny sparrows and hummingbirds dancing around the flowers of the plum tree; songbirds trilling. The harshness of winter is behind us.

Despite not watering and pruning this tree, not giving it any real love or attention, it continues to be dependable and prolific.

I look forward to the perfume of plums ripening in my kitchen. Nothing is as wonderful as biting into the amber flesh and allowing the clear juice to run down my chin.

After a few weeks of non-stop eating, I’m satiated. Yet others tell me they can’t get enough of this fruit.

Don’t you forget about me this year, a friend says.

If you want to come over and climb a ladder, help yourself, I answer.

If I climb a ladder to bridge the chasms, will it be worth it, or will I fall?

In the summer, this tree is weighed down so much by its fruit that it needs to be propped up with a stick, a visible reminder of how much goodness this tree gives.

I imagine the tree’s complex network of roots searching deep underground to find a source of life-giving water to nourish itself.

How do I nourish my spirit when it’s dry and withered?

Things this plum tree has witnessed: birthday cakes and birthday parties. A kiddie pool that lasted just an afternoon one summer. A bounce house that winter. Another bounce house the following winter. That time we dyed socks. My efforts at being a backyard gardener. Dinners outside. Ants. The neighbor’s cat. That stray rabbit. People who once came over frequently but no longer visit because of quarantine, new seasons of life, or small conflicts that festered and coalesced into something bigger, something that doesn’t have a name or shape anymore.

Or maybe it’s just a lost connection. I’m not sure anymore.

These blossoms are fleeting: in just a few weeks, they will be torn apart by the wind. Their fragile nature and impermanence have always struck me, like they’re a metaphor for something.

My hands and a pair of smaller ones will collect the plums in four months when the green small marbles deepen into crimson globes, and we’ll give much of our harvest away.

After the summer, after a period of cold and reset, this tree will bloom once more the following spring and offer me hope again. Where will I be in a year?

[Originally published in The Bluebird Word in March 2022.]

Michele Tjin is an emerging writer who writes others’ stories by day and her own by night. When she is not writing, she aspires to be a better backyard gardener.

Julia

28 June 2025 / Editor

Nonfiction by Pama Lee Bennett

I’m standing beside a gurney in the emergency room, a gurney on which my great-aunt, age 104, is lying. Some preliminary tests have been done. A doctor we haven’t seen before enters and stands opposite me across the gurney. He doesn’t address her but begins talking over her to me.

“She appears to have a kidney condition, but I’m not sure we can do much to help her at her age.”

I look down at her, and back to him.

“Doctor, I’d like you to do for her whatever you would do for me, or yourself, or your own mother.”

“Well, your aunt is very old. She is probably at the end of her life.”

I think to myself, wait for it, wait for it.

My aunt looks up at him sweetly and says, “Doctor, I would like to live. But if I die, it’s all right.”

The look on his face: priceless.

He mumbles that certain procedures might injure her delicate body, but he can order some medication. I say, “Ok, I can understand that, but let’s do what we can.”

He leaves the room.

He can’t know that she walked on her own and lived on her own until 100. That she loves to play Skip-Bo with family members every week. That she reads voraciously and still keeps in touch with former students from her days as a one-room school teacher. That she hushes me in conversation if Tiger Woods comes on the golf channel and she wants to watch him play.

I can’t know that nine months from now, she will die suddenly and quietly of natural causes one afternoon, just short of 105.

I can’t know that. But neither can the doctor.

Pama Lee Bennett is a retired speech-language pathologist living in Sioux City, IA. She has taught English at summer language camps in Poland and at a school there in 2019. Her work has appeared in Tipton Poetry Journal, Evening Street Review, The Bluebird Word, The Penwood Review, and others.