While I was growing up, my grandmother had the most fantastic garden in the entire neighborhood! Flowers of every hue, fragrance, and description fairly burst into bloom each spring.
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“Come with me, I want you to see something,” implored my husband, Robert. “What is it?” I asked with irritation. It had been a stressful day caring for my 14 year old Yorkshire Terrier Merlin, whose health was rapidly failing. “Just come with me, he repeated. It was a warm spring evening when Robert gingerly opened the...
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One of my best friends is a whale. I know this might sound strange, but we have been friends for 20 years now. Granny is not just any whale, but an orca, a killer whale, who swims free in Puget Sound. This 100 year-old female is the matriarch of J pod, a family of resident orcas that frequent the waters of Washington State and...
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© 2009 Christine Graf Somewhere between sleep and the cloudy space where dreams take root and go deeper, I roused from the anvil weight of drugs. I heard whispering, as bed sheets fluttered and snapped into military folds. Still thinking I was in a dream state, I saw what appeared to be a Nubian queen, wearing a bright orange...
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Cool, damp air brushed my cheeks as I walked down the stairs into the dimly lit tunnel of the el station on State and Jackson. Familiar odors of dirt-soaked cement, rusted steel and stale wood floated on the tunnel breezes. Imagining what strangers or critters I might see...
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I watched as she threw her head back so that it hung over the edge of the bed, hair dangling to the floor; long, thick and silky hair; not like mine – frizzy, wild and hard to manage. That summer night in 1957, Pam showed me how to brush my hair. She held the brush deliberately, pulling it through her hair...
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List the most important people in your life, and write a descriptive phrase about each of them,” was the prompt I was given in my writing class. Checking my list, I brimmed with emotion, craving contact with several people, especially Dorothy, the woman I’d met when I was nineteen. In 1974 Dorothy and I had just begun a...
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Gently massaging his wrist, I held his hand in both of mine. He was Adeeb, a Syrian who had come to the United States in the 1930’s. Even when I was a little girl in Sunday School, this elderly man had seemed old. He carried candies in his pocket,
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I was already a movie buff by the time I was five. On Saturdays my family would drive the fifty miles over rocky, barely passable Wyoming roads from Grass Creek to Thermopolis to see whichever motion picture Hollywood had sent to the single theatre. So, even before I started first grade, I knew how the swashbuckling heroes were...
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Her hands were larger than mine; her heart too, for that matter. She was twenty-two months younger than I, but her life was shorter. She was my sister, Pam. Her long, bony fingers were clubbed at the tips, with splayed, purple-tinged nails that suggested the lack of oxygen in her blood. Her palms were salty. She had “Sixty-five...
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