Category: Nonfiction (Page 5 of 11)

Photo of Father's Coat (courtesy of author)

My Father’s Coat, in Three Acts

1 July 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Cheryl Sadowski

How old am I—four? five? awaiting my father’s arrival. I stare out the picture window of our living room watching snow fall like feathers when his car rolls into the driveway. The door swings open, and my mother cheerfully calls out. I see my father’s face and run headlong into his herringbone coat: it smells of spice, wool, and winter. I huddle against his legs and look down at his shiny black shoes. Whether or not my father loves his herringbone coat, or even likes it, I cannot say. Only that it is his.

So called for its resemblance to fish bones, herringbone is an interlocking pattern of zig-zag lines known for strength and durability. Ancient Egyptians borrowed the design from nature for their jewelry. Romans laid roads in a herringbone pattern. Herringbone tweed began as a working man’s cloth, serious and sturdy, to guard against the damp climates of Scotland and England.

My father’s coat is classic herringbone, tightly woven, with woolen Vs in black and gray, and an expertly tailored, glossy black lining. A sewn-in patch indicates provenance: Diamond’s Store for Men, a sartorial staple for professional attire during the 1960s and 70s.

For years the coat hangs in our cramped foyer closet amid a cadre of more flamboyant jackets: my mother’s Christmas cloak, my younger brother’s recreational wear, my high school letter jacket with a giant green ‘M’ emblazoned on the breast. I catch a glimpse of herringbone pattern—steadfast, stoic—whenever I grab my own coat and run out the door.

II.

My father’s coat accompanies me to college in Wisconsin, though I have no memory of asking him if I could take it. I wear it walking to classes, laughing and kicking through snow drifts with friends on the way to Ivan’s Pizza. Wisconsin winters are stark and cold. The herringbone acts like armor, blunting the sharp winds.

The coat is too big for me, but when I pair it with black biker boots and patterned tights, I love the way it makes me feel: artistic, complicated, like Ally Sheedy in The Breakfast Club. It is a warm, woolen talisman, cloaking me after nasty rows with my boyfriend. When I wear the herringbone with a pink velvet scarf, I am La Boheme! conjugating French verbs while I walk … je travaille, tu travailles, il travaille.

I recall a scene from Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary: Emma Bovary, fresh from the winter air, lifts her hem to warm her foot by the fire, the allure and power of her well-revealed ankle. The hem of my father’s coat brushes over the tops of my boots when I walk. My calves are strong and young beneath its shelter. I saunter, sing-songing, insouciant, and free.

III.

It’s February. Seated on a cold, steel outdoor bench, I wait for the train. Beneath the elevated platform, office workers escape the manacles of cubicles and conference rooms. I, too, am tethered to the office, and to Chicago rents and utility bills. My father’s coat, now vintage, is admired by colleagues.

Snow sifts down through the mesh muslin sky. I raise the crook of my elbow to my nose and breathe in deeply. The coat’s fibers are still coarse and sturdy, the herringbone pattern so close, familiar. But the memory is thin, a wavering white veil between myself and my childhood.

I can’t see my father’s face to know if he is happy or tired or anxious. I long for the smell of spice, wool, and winter. My black biker boots are long gone, and I have no idea what became of my pink velvet scarf.

I reach back to the classroom: Nous travaillons. We are working.

The train approaches, a rushing ribbon of herringbone on iron wheels, unspooling, unstoppable. I stare at the long track ahead. It bends around the corner and disappears into the distance. Briefcase in hand, I rise and brush the snow from my lap. For the first time I notice that my father’s coat is heavy.

Cheryl Sadowski writes essays and short fiction that explore the connections of everyday life with landscape, literature, art, and the natural world. Her writing appears in About Place Journal, Vita Poetica, Orchards Poetry Journal, EcoTheo Review, Broadkill Review, After the Art, and Bay to Ocean Journal. She lives in Northern Virginia.

Defining Silence

29 June 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Candy Hamilton

As I take notes on Latin influence in Indo-European languages, playground noises easily distract me. On the school playground across the street, a dozen or so kids are shifting in some ad hoc football game, full of passes and soprano yells. Long after the bell shrills over the thuds on the playground. Mostly the voices blur, but now and then from my living room rocking chair, I distinctly hear, “No it didn’t go out. No we don’t need ’em.” I have much more to do than watch youngsters celebrating a warm fall day, but nothing better to do than watch surrogates for my grandchildren three hundred miles away, so I lean forward in my chair to peer through the storm door window.

Two kids weave their bicycles through the ad-lib formations without bothering the football players. I’m watching two ballet performances winding through each other. One boy, (They are all boys, I think) taller than the others, already has that loose-limbed walk that comes with adolescence and for some never disappears. Slack arms pumping faster, more flowing than his legs, he moves as if his muscles and bones float in water. He knows nothing about gravity, and his shoulders have a life of their own.

Finally a smaller boy actually catches the ball and runs triumphant toward the fence—straight toward me. If he knew I was here, now standing behind the door, perhaps he’d leap the fence, the road, score his touchdown through my front door. Green Bay style. Perhaps he’d prefer to leap the tree where the birds and squirrels make up the cheering section, or perhaps they sound more like coaches cussing and raising hell over so many dropped passes.

The kids don’t have a running game except for chasing the ball bouncing in its oval wobbles around the paved playground. A break in the action, and finally I notice the empty parking lot—no school today. These boys have scrimmaged through a perfect unending recess while I dreaded the arrival of teachers or a principal full of discipline.

Then the kids start a kicking game, pretty much straight up straight down, so that one kicker catches his own punt—the only catch in this game. Nobody cares. They just want to run, kick, and yell the freedom of their day-off. The bicycles join two rollerbladers, a moving horizontal backdrop to the vertical kicking game.

One last thud and the players disappear, only their voices (words even less discernible) walking back through the trees. They wander off in all directions, pairs, threesome, a little round one churning his legs to keep up, three spans of his legs to the others’ steps. Only the squirrels and birds and I remain to consider an empty, silent playground. Now so many distant words run together, they are like silence; the same as the blend of squirrels, birds, refrigerator hum, my breathing, the occasional turning of a book page, no silence at all.

Having celebrated the freedom of ignoring school bells, the kids go home to complain they have nothing to do. I do not have to hear those words to know they say them.

Candy Hamilton, an award winning journalist and poet, has also published essays and short stories in many literary magazines and national publications. She lives in Rapid City, S.D., with three rescued dogs and a ridiculous number of books.

white duck swimming on clear water — Photo by hasan kurt on Pexels.com

Duck Duck Goose

22 June 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Alice Lowe

Sociability—inclined by nature to companionship with others of the same species

Singular in her snowy splendor, the white goose floated majestically in the Balboa Park lily pond amid a raft of small mallard ducks, the males’ iridescent green heads, the females stippled brown. A groundskeeper told me, “She appeared one day and hasn’t left.” Was she lost, separated from her flock? Or, maybe, a loner within her own species, she chose this idyllic spot.

Geese and ducks are social animals, happiest in groups, gaggles of geese, rafts of ducks. Marine turtles, blue whales, snow leopards, polar bears, jaguars, orangutans, giant pandas, and platypuses are instinctively solitary. Compared to owls, sloths, deer, octopi, wolves, beavers, meerkats, and house cats (mine included), which are considered introverts.

The cartoon shows a passel of partying possums, smiling faces and wine glasses in hand. One is splayed out on the floor, face up. A bystander says to another: “He’s fine; he just plays dead when he’s had enough socializing.” I send the cartoon to a few friends, with the notation, “This is me.” Except I don’t play dead—I disappear.

Humans are social animals, though to varying degrees. Sociability is a measure of how much interaction with others a person needs. Social isolation can lead to adverse health consequences, as was seen during the Covid pandemic, but most of us have regular interaction with others at work or home or out and about. I’m an introvert but not a recluse. I like people, but I prefer them one to one, in small doses. Being coupled with a kindred spirit, my social needs are satisfied without leaving the house.

One day, months later, as my goose glides around the pond, her mirror image reflected by the water, I suddenly question her identity. Back home I study photographs—geese and ducks, white geese and white ducks, side by side. The shape of the head, the curve of the bill, the length of the neck. Now it’s obvious—she’s a Pekin duck. Not quite the outsider I’d thought, she’s not alone or lonely. I suspect she’s like me, as sociable as she wants or needs to be.

Alice Lowe’s flash nonfiction was published in September 2022 in The Bluebird Word, and also this past year in Change Seven, Drunk Monkeys, Midway, Eclectica, Eat Darling Eat, Fauxmoir, Idle Ink, Potato Soup, and Dorothy Parker’s Ashes. Alice writes about life, literature, food and family in San Diego, California, posted at www.aliceloweblogs.wordpress.com.

Haleakala Sunrise

18 June 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Sherri Wright

The sky is pitch black and the temperature drops from seventy degrees to the thirties as our son-in-law drives the switchback road up the mountain. The trip is only twenty miles but it will take us more than two hours to reach the summit of Haleakala at 10,023 feet. Cramped into the back seat my husband, our nineteen year old grandson, and I flop into each other on every hairpin turn and our ears pop as we continue the climb. My daughter follows the route on her phone warning Azi of steep drop offs and approaching turns. Jenny wants to share with her husband and son the experience she remembers when she came here as a child.

At the top we step out of the warm car into a cutting wind and an immense dark sky — not just above but wrapping all around us — uninterrupted by tree or cloud or human made thing. And millions and millions of stars unobstructed by light pollution. The landscape is a monochrome grey surface of lava and rocks like I imagine on the face of the moon. We make our way up an uneven stone path toward the rim of the crater. Hundreds of people in parkas, rain coats and blankets murmur over the whisper of the wind. Jenny and I talk about how years ago we’d worn sandals and wrapped ourselves in beach towels but today the air feels so cold and the wind so bitter that I can’t stop shaking. Harry gives me his hoodie and swears he’s not cold. Sunrise won’t happen for another hour and a half. The thin air makes us feel light headed.

As the dark begins to lift, a warm blush rises above the horizon and exposes the width of the bowl and the depth of the cavern below. Few plants are able to survive here but scattered down the cinder slopes of the crater I see round grey bundles of silver sword. This ahinahina can live up to ninety years. Once in its lifetime it sends up a spectacular six foot stalk of vibrant purple flowers, then dies and scatters seeds to the wind. Here on Haleakala is the only place in the world the ahinahina grows. The mood is mystical. Early Hawaiians believed that the demigod Maui stood at this summit and lassoed the sun to slow its journey and lengthen the day. Thus, the name Haleakala means “house of the sun.”

In a swirl of light and grey and yellow, mauve and orange hues, a hush comes over the crowd and then an eerie silence. A silence I can feel in my chest and my bones. When the sun appears then quickly rises above the rim, the throng breaks into gentle applause. Black silhouettes in the glow, my daughter hugs her son.

Sherri Wright is a member of the Rehoboth Beach Writers Guild and the Key West Poetry Guild. Her work has appeared in Creative Nonfiction, Dreamer’s Creative Writing, Persimmon Tree, Ocotillo Review, Delaware Beach Life, Raven’s Perch, and Quartet.

piano keys — Photo by Andrik Langfield on Unsplash

For Sale: Kawai Upright Piano, $1,250

12 June 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Angela Kasumova

Available now! A Kawai Upright Piano, in excellent condition, beautiful walnut finish. Purchased new eight years ago by a father for his daughter. She’d been taking lessons for six years and practicing on a broken, hand-me-down piano, but when her father started having an affair, new things suddenly materialized. Like a computer, to replace the typewriter she struggled to write school papers on, and then a few months later, the piano. The daughter treasured this piano, its timely arrival allowing her to finally take pleasure in playing her most practiced and favorite pieces: Daydream by Tchaikovsky and To a Wild Rose by Edward MacDowell. And though she only played it for a year or so before she stopped lessons, it was the one thing she absolutely had to bring with her when she and her mother eventually fled. It moved with her from her semi-rural childhood house to an urban apartment, and finally to the condo her mother purchased upon her divorce, where it resides now. It’s been gently used these past few years to play Christmas songs or figure out melodies the daughter and her boyfriend enjoy, like Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, which is much harder than it sounds. It breaks this daughter’s heart to be selling this lovely instrument, but she needs extra money to pay for student health insurance, and this is the only item of value she owns. She doesn’t know how much she’ll miss this piano or how much she’ll regret letting it go. She doesn’t know how she’ll wish she’d found another way. Financial worries and unprocessed grief cloud her vision, but perhaps her loss may be your gain. See above: excellent condition, beautiful walnut finish.

Serious buyers only, please.

Angela Kasumova is a lifelong writer and reader with over a decade of experience working in the fields of mental health and education. She lives with her husband and sons near Boston, Massachusetts.

bunch of photo print — Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

The Old Photographs

3 June 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Joan Potter

My ex-son-in-law, who’s been out of my life for several years, just mailed me two photographs. I’m looking at one of them now. It’s an 8 x 10 print, in muted colors overlaid with a faded golden tint. Resting on a table in the foreground is an oblong Pyrex dish holding the remains of a green bean casserole, some creamy sauce still coating the inside corner. Next to it is an earthenware bowl with a spoon balanced on its edge, and a glass half full of red wine.

Across the table sit three of the dozen or so family members celebrating Thanksgiving in my daughter’s dining room. I’m on the left, wearing a red ribbed turtleneck, my grey hair cut short. I’m looking off in the direction of someone out of the picture.

Next to me is my youngest grandson, still with the chubby cheeks of a twelve-year-old. He’s smiling as he digs into his plate of food; he always loved to eat. On his other side is his teenage cousin, face partly hidden by the wine glass in the foreground, glancing with amusement at his young relative.

We always gathered for Thanksgiving dinner at the house my daughter shared with her then-husband and their two girls. It was just a few miles from where my husband and I lived in our New York City suburb. Their house had the most room, as well as a fireplace we could relax in front of after dinner.

The second photograph my ex-son-in-law enclosed was taken in the living room. In this one, my eldest granddaughter, a teenager then, is in the foreground, strumming a guitar with her lips parted in song. My husband, wearing a colorful sweater and khaki pants, is seated in a chair near her, looking thoughtful.

These pictures were taken almost twenty years ago. I don’t know why my former son-in-law decided to send them now. Perhaps he’s feeling sentimental. He and my daughter have been divorced for several years – amicably, she says. The chubby-cheeked grandson is now thirty, an engineer. His older cousin, my second daughter’s son, works on an upstate horse farm. I never hear from him.

The guitar-playing granddaughter lives in a small Midwestern city where she moved to be close to her younger sister, whose husband is studying at the university there. The younger sister is now planning to file for divorce. The older one, the guitar-playing one, is pregnant with her first child. She says she’s been having some problems with her boyfriend, the baby’s father, but they’re working things out. My husband, who was pensively listening to his granddaughter’s song, has been dead for six years.

Now that I’ve pored over these two photographs long enough, there’s no reason to keep them. They’re too big to store and the quality is poor. I already have closet shelves full of albums and boxes stuffed with hundreds of pictures of family as toddlers, teenagers, new parents, grandparents. It can be both enjoyable and painful to sift through them – my mother and father smiling in front of their California house, my four kids eating lobster rolls in Maine, and the many images of my husband, looking proud and content, with various babies resting on his lap.

Joan Potter‘s personal essays have appeared in anthologies and literary journals. Her piece, The Blur, appeared in the January, 2023 issue of The Bluebird Word. Her work has also been published in Persimmon Tree, The RavensPerch, Bright Flash Literary Review, Iron Horse Review, and others. She has published several nonfiction books.

The Leaving Moment

9 May 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Tracey Ormerod

I don’t remember packing, but my things must have been on the truck: the plastic-yellow colander I still use every day, the one he cursed while poking the holes with a corkscrew to dislodge spaghetti starch; and the crock pot—just last week, it slow-stewed the roast.

I do remember what couldn’t go on the truck: the propane tank. Over thirty years later, the moving guy no longer has a face but I can still see his burly body hauling it over to where I stood and dropping it at my feet. The lawn muffled the thud. “It’s full … can’t go on the truck.”

He left it there and went back to lift off the truck ramp. He was ready to leave. I turned to my mother in a panic. “What do I do with it? Do I just leave it here?”

He softened and came back. “Here, you open it up, like this.”

He turned the valve. The tank whistled.

Researchers say we alter our memories every time we look.

Quantum particles are like that too. Scientists can’t watch them without changing them, so they’ll never know how they behave when no one is looking. Nonetheless, they can’t help themselves.

Maybe that’s why countries and cultures carve their collective memories deep into stone and story.

Families collect them too. They share ‘remember whens’ that hold their tales together, until there’s a rupture and the timeline becomes a shredded thread of itself.

In a review^[1] of the film, Women Talking, Eliza Smith reflects on her missing memory of leaving her first marriage:

“I may not be able to recall my own leaving moment … but I do remember the precarious, optimistic feeling of leaving one world for another that didn’t quite exist yet.”

She mentions a friend who can’t remember her leaving moment either. So, for the first time, I learn there’s at least two other women like me.

How many of us are out there? A collective without a memory.

I don’t remember why he didn’t get the tank, except maybe the barbecue had been a gift from my side of the family, like the bone china and crystal bowls.

I also don’t recall where my two-year-old was that day.

And then there’s the house keys. How did they get dropped off with the real estate lawyer? I’m not even sure how we sold our house; I don’t remember any sales agents or buyers.

So many details that would’ve been important at the time, while the only other thing I can remember is a song that played on the car radio: Wilson Phillips singing “Hold On, things can change. Things can go your way …”

We leave home. We get left—they say there’s fifty ways to leave a lover. Sometimes, we leave the country. There’s also the countless tiny leavings, like after a dinner date or a party.

We arrive. We leave. Over and over and over until, at last, we depart dearly.

I don’t remember why the mover left the tank with me, except maybe he was hungry and took a lunchbreak. It was full and emptying it would take time.

Even when gas weighs heavy in a tank, it comes out invisible, but I stood there and stared down at it like there was something to see while it hissed like a snake in a pressure cooker, making my leaving loud for the neighbours watching from behind their bay window sheers.

Silent together, we couldn’t help but watch as it grew quiet and the frost spread all over the tank, the kind that burns when you touch it.

^[1] Smith, Eliza. “The Most Satisfying Me Too Movie Yet.” The Cut, January 20, 2023. https://www.thecut.com/article/women-talking-me-too-movie.html.

Tracey Ormerod is a Canadian writer and photographer. After growing up in the wilds of the city, she now lives among the forests and farms of rural Ontario. At times an accountant, business analyst, website consultant, and classroom teacher, she is now enjoying a writing life. Read more at https://traceyormerod.com.

The Litterer and I

30 April 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Marcia Yudkin

This year the litter is blue – a bright, metallic hue found nowhere in nature. Not even our lake sparkling in the reflection of a cloudless sky matches that color. Nestled among stalks of ragweed or heaps of dried-up leaves along the roads near me, blue cans glint in sunlight.

In the past I spotted much more variety in the tossed-out containers: amber Michelob bottles, fruit-colored hard-seltzer cans, translucent one-shot nips of brandy or vodka, red pop-tops sporting the distinctive Coca-Cola script and white Budweisers speckled with red and blue swirls. But this summer and fall, it’s overwhelmingly blue Bud Lights blighting the roadsides.

For years I’ve waged a secret campaign against such aluminum discards. During my daily five-mile walks from home, if a can catches my eye in the quarter-mile or half-mile stretches without any houses I’ll gingerly pick it up and drop it off in the brush beside the next driveway. The cans normally disappear within a week rather than start to form a junkyard. In this way, I spread responsibility for restoring nature’s harmonious palette of greens, grays and browns, so restful to experience.

Why don’t I instead blitz through my walking routes once in a while, adding all the tossed-away cans to a trash bag like a reverse Santa Claus? Humorist David Sedaris did this obsessively in West Sussex, where he lives, his hauls becoming legendary to the point that his district named a garbage truck “Pigpen Sedaris” to honor him.

For me, though, the idea of getting known in my neighborhood as a trash vigilante makes me uneasy. While some would applaud my public service, others might kick dirt in my face over it, like the gun-loving guy one town over who taunted his opposite-politics neighbor by plunking a ratty old portable toilet at the outlet of their shared driveway. It feels safer not to be conspicuous, to carefully stick to the path of peaceful co-existence.

Until this summer and fall, I assumed from the variety of roadside trash that it came from random passers-through, drivers from other towns who had no reason to care if they littered here. “Why do people do this?” I once asked a hiking buddy who grew up in our area. In Massachusetts, Anne told me, it’s illegal to have an open container of anything alcoholic in a moving truck or car. For some reason I didn’t know this.

People who chug a beer on the way home from work therefore toss the can when it’s almost empty, Anne said, so as to not get in trouble if a cop stopped them. Yet never once in 20 years have I seen anyone pulled over by police on our back roads – not for speeding, for having an out-of-date inspection sticker or for anything else. Or maybe they didn’t want folks at home to know how many beers they were drinking.

And now because almost all the cans matched one another and because new empties would show up like overnight tin mushrooms right after I cleared a stretch of road, I began to suspect that this was from just one Bud Light fan who lived nearby. If I tracked where the blue discards appeared and which roads never had them, mightn’t that indicate the culprit’s homeward route – and maybe lead like breadcrumbs to his location? Perhaps he (yes, in my mind it was a man) would nod nicely when I told him the impact of his tosses onto seemingly neglected yet actually cherished verges.

After all, soon after my husband and I first moved to the country, a guy who often canoed in the marsh behind our house came by and complained that the regulation-blue tarp we’d hung up to shelter our back deck from rain spoiled his view. Couldn’t we put up something brown instead? Surprised, we replaced the tarp – almost exactly the vivid hue of the Bud Lights bothering me now – with something matching our dark wood shingles. Since then, the natural colorscape I live amongst has grown on me.

But most likely the litterer would respond with “Who do you think you are, lady?” Right. Who do I think I am? Am I being righteous or self-righteous? Asked in my imagination, the questions echoed and echoed.

As a cleanup fairy, I’m not doing any harm, I finally decided, especially if I move the litter to unobtrusive staging areas instead of next to driveways. One Saturday I hauled seventeen half-smashed blue beasties to the town dump along with my own week’s trash. Soon a blanket of white, growing higher and higher, began to cover any cans I missed. And when the winter sun twinkled, winking at me as I walked were Bud Light-colored reflectors, waist-high on long metal stems, telling the snowplows where not to go.

Marcia Yudkin lives in the woods of Goshen, Massachusetts (population 960). The author of 17 books, she publishes a Substack newsletter called Introvert UpThink (https://www.introvertupthink.com) in which she critiques society’s myths and misunderstandings about introverts.

Counting

18 April 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Ann Bracken

I always count. Drinks, that is. I notice how many times a guy refills his beer glass or how many glasses of wine my friend drinks. I used to count my husband’s beers every night—up to three, he was pretty nice. After that, at around five, he went one of two ways—either he fell asleep on the sofa and snored like a buzz saw or he wanted to have sex. Go figure, especially after so much alcohol.

I counted how many cases of beer I had to buy a week. Why did I have to buy the beer anyway? I wasn’t drinking it. I hated beer, its stickiness, its stale smell in the morning when he didn’t finish a can. I drank wine, but usually only one glass. The two hangovers I’d experienced in college acted as powerful deterrents. And looming over every social occasion, the specter of my mother’s alcohol abuse clung to me like a shroud.

Parties were the worst—when he had too many beers for me to count. I could always tell because he’d come find me, and spit out a barrage of cruel jokes.

One of his favorite lines went like this, “Man, you should see her when she stumbles around the badminton court. She couldn’t hit the birdie if it flew into her racket.”

If we were playing pool, he gave a running commentary of every shot I took. “Whoa, first time you ever picked up a cue, sweetie?” or “If you want to be sure and win, just ask Annie to shoot a round with you.”

He’d get everyone laughing at me and then refuse to leave the party when I’d had enough. He always drove home. I was so numb to his drinking and pot smoking, I never questioned his fitness to drive.

“Sounds like an alcoholic to me,” the counselor said when I described how Randy never appeared drunk even after five or six beers. “High tolerance. That’s a sign.”

I never connected Randy’s drinking and his abusive behavior because he always teased me or made fun of me in front of people. It was just worse when we were at parties and I couldn’t leave when I’d had enough.

After the divorce, I dated a great guy—a lawyer at the EPA who invited me to dinner and a jazz concert. He had a martini before dinner, and I joined him. Then he ordered a glass of wine. I began counting. On our second date, he told me one of his brothers was homeless because he was an alcoholic. “My dad’s an alcoholic, too, but he always kept his job.” I figured his odds for having a problem. Every time we went out, he had a martini or Manhattan before dinner and then some wine. I kept counting.

“Last night, I went to a dinner party with some friends, and I had too much to drink.”

“What does that look like?” I asked.

“Not much. I just get kind of loud and talk a lot. Make stupid jokes.”

Sometimes the danger signals flash early. My stomach lurched as he described his embarrassing behavior, which sounded all too much like Randy’s.

“That’s not going to work for me,” I told him. I added “bad dinner party behavior” to his count.

One night as he measured out gin for his martini, he spilled it on the counter. Before I could give him a paper towel, he bent over and slurped it up. The next morning, I asked him if he’d ever gone to AA. “Yeah, but only because my ex-girlfriend insisted. I’m not really an alcoholic.”

I totaled up his count. “If you want to keep seeing me, you need to stop drinking and go to AA.”

He called me a few days later. “It’s 9PM and I’m having my first glass of wine for the evening.”

When I asked if he’d made a decision, he said, “You’re almost enough to make me stop drinking.”

I was tired of counting.

Ann Bracken has published three poetry collections and a memoir. She serves as a contributing editor for Little Patuxent Review and co-facilitates the Wilde Readings Poetry Series in Columbia, Maryland. She volunteers for the Justice Arts Coalition, exchanging letters with incarcerated people to foster their use of the arts.

When Stars Align

11 April 2023 / Editor

Nonfiction by Simone Kadden

Schlepping past tailgaters in parking lots isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but it was my
mother’s. She stopped to examine a plate, a vase, or a necklace and speak to the vendor about a similar one in a distant place. Then, she’d put it down, and we’d move down the line.

When she was in her nineties and used a walker, we opted to drive into the countryside for our treasure hunts. Traveling along curvy back roads with handwritten road signs, we scrounged odd shops offering catches that otherwise detoured to the dump.

Scavengers have their Holy Grail—tea cups, costume jewelry, bird cages, dishware, and figurines. For us, it was buttons. As a kid, I collected them in a tin when I wasn’t arranging them on the floor. Each was a piece of art, distinct in size, shape, and design.

Aunt Lisel, my mother’s older sister, was my leading supplier. As Head Seamstress at Bergdorf Goodman, Manhattan’s premier department store, she brought buttons from coats, suits, and gowns she altered for the rich and famous. “Where did you get this one, Tante Lisel?” I asked, and she described in detail the article of clothing and its prominent owner.

One day, my mother and I took a 20mph cruise down a sleepy main street in a mountain town. Suddenly, my mother extended her left arm and grabbed my right elbow. “Hold it! Slow down and park the car.” I followed her orders and helped her out of the car. We walked a short distance until we stood before The Button Up, where the window displayed bolts of fabric, yarn, and crocheted throws. Blanketing the entire black floor were buttons, studs, and toggles made of velvet, glass, leather, pearl, rhinestone, and fabrics in vibrant colors, dazzling like the night’s brightest stars.

“When you were little, we collected buttons and kept them in a container, remember?” my mother asked, without turning from the display.

“Of course, I remember. We had a tin with triangle-shaped wafers on the lid we always struggled with, as if its bottom were bigger than its top.”

My mother laughed at what she had forgotten. “On rainy days when you were a little girl, we sat on the floor for hours, spreading them out and making pictures.”

“Remember when we had enough duplicates to design twins?” I asked, to which she knowingly nodded.

I still had the collection at home and wanted to go spill out all the buttons, thinking, like a Ouija board, they’d offer a mysterious projection into the future.

“When I was four,” my mother began, “my wild imagination was my best friend after my mother died, and I dreamed the impossible. My grandmother’s apartment was on the first floor of our house. I loved to visit her and thought my mother would be there, hiding behind the couch or under the bed where I liked to crawl.

“My grandmother would take all her buttons from a black silk coin purse and create designs on the dining table. ‘Let’s make something pretty that your mother would have loved,’ my grandmother would say. Sometimes she mentioned one button came from my grandfather’s coat or another was from my mother’s sweater. It was a lovely distraction for a sad little girl.

“The emerald glass buttons, the enamel ones with gold filigree, and the square silver-plated ones found homes in my creations. The jewel tones reminded me of my mother’s green eyes, though her jewels had gold flecks dancing in them.

“One autumn day, during the afternoon’s waning hours, Oma Julie entered the room with the silver tray holding hot cocoa and homemade butter cookies. She placed the tray on the table, and from the buffet, she retrieved a bundle tied with a purple ribbon. I unwrapped it to find a deep burgundy velvet pillow, the color of grapes in the vineyards that blanketed the hillsides. Sewn on the pillow were buttons duplicating the image we last created. A little face (me!), a house with a black chimney churning out brown and gray buttons resembling smoke, yellow and white flowers, and the sun peeking out from the pillow’s corner.”

My mother wanted to show her mother what she and Oma Julie had created, even
though my mother didn’t know when that might be. Her sweet memory continued.

“I hugged Oma Julie’s tiny frame and put my face against her neck. I inhaled the jasmine-scented soap she used. The warmth of Grandma Julie’s body encircling mine, the scent of freshly baked cookies, and the beautiful pillow left me missing my mother more than ever, and I unraveled into tears. My lost mother, wherever she was, had come from this petite woman, and in my child’s mind, I thought my mother might be nearby and return to the place from which she came.

“My Grandmother slowly pulled away from me. Her gentle hands cupped the sides of my head. She looked at me intently, as if hoping I would record the moment within my young soul.

“‘Gretel,’ Oma Julie said softly, ‘this pillow is for both of us. What we share is ours forever. We will keep this pillow as a reminder that people sometimes leave us and don’t return, but they are not lost. Every day we find them again. We only need to know where to look.’”

My mother sighed deeply and shifted her gaze from The Button Up window to me, indicating the story had ended. She looked at me with what I believe was the same look her grandmother gave her 90 years earlier. With a slight shake of her head, as if releasing a moment, my mother asked, “Now, how about some hot cocoa and cookies?”

It sounded like a tender toast to another time.

My mother stores her memories like a squirrel stashing nuts within a tree trunk. She retrieves them one by one, and when the stars align, she reaches for her silver tray.

Simone Kadden lives in Madrid with her husband and rescue dog, Lulita. She’s collected stories, relationships, jobs, and dogs in Manhattan, DC, Chicago, Boston, and Sonoma County. She taught at Harvard, worked at The Washington Post and on U.N.-sponsored projects, and wrote two books for the University of Michigan Press.