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…
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…
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…
Friday, October 13th: the perfect day to launch our annual literary horror issue. Something wonderful happens–a switch, a one eighty, a backwards drive on a roundabout–when I give myself over to the season of horror. To throw a party in spite of the darkness. To claim and reclaim. To lay it out: Here is the…
Every early summer, I start to pine for the Dungeness Spit. For those who aren’t familiar, this narrow band of rocky sand is the longest spit in the United States, about five miles long, stretching into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, part of the Salish Sea. I reside one scenic-hour drive from this special…
Greetings, Spring. Here in name and date, yet you still hunker, hail dropping like small, felled birds from my blue sky. But I will greet you anyway, because I love you, and I want you to be here. In Volume 4, Issue 2 of Club Plum, the ones we love are often out of reach.…
I wish I could introduce this year’s Literary Horror issue, Volume 3, Issue 4 of Club Plum, with something light, paying homage to breath-stopping make-believe horrors that entertain or instruct, or nodding to wondrous non-horror works, bringing it full circle to this issue. But we are in the midst of real horror that I must…
Club Plum 