In August, my husband flew across the country to visit his father. My father-in-law is eighty-two, and he is our only remaining parent, so time ticks. I suggested this visit might be the time to ship the fish tureen to our home. In my father-in-law’s home, the large, ornate fish tureen fits easily inside his…
This is a new thing. To sit and look, which is to say, to gaze through my home windows, where I am lucky enough to see wild, evergreen branches and patches of sky beyond. This looking is not casual, but premeditated, where I slide my table place mat, ferrying my lunch salad to the side…
My husband walked into the house last Friday evening with a bundle of daffodils, just because, along with baguettes and Italian sausage and provolone because it was Friday, and this is the evening of the week where we give in to total relaxation and easy culinary pleasures. The work week is done. It is time…
January 2025 has been hard for many of us. I won’t talk about my personal loss in detail because it is too large for this space. But I will mention that it is a loss that is blanketed with regret, which creates a lump from my throat to my heart. I’m angry at one person,…
Where I live, the aurora borealis painted the skies last week, a few days in a row, so I am told. I very much want to see them one day, and even though I had a second chance, and a third, I did not stay up late to watch; no, I did not say to…
Hurrah! Let’s congratulate Artist Carolyn Schlam, whose oil-on-canvas artwork, Little Sister, was chosen as an Art Winner by the Sundress art judge for this year’s Best of the Net publication. See Little Sister below and also at the BOTN page here. This makes three consecutive years that Club Plum contributors’ work has been chosen by…
Mid-May, my husband and I flew across the country from Western Washington to Western New York to visit our parents: one father and one mother. They are eighty years old. A day will come, not so far from today–one year? Two? Tomorrow?–when I will not have the opportunity to hear another word from my mother’s…
I’ve been buying tablecloths. We have one table only in our small home, and it is a new table, purchased after twenty years of using a secondhand table, a crack in the base zip-tied ten years into the using. Our new table extends to fit family on days when we all come together, and we…
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