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Dish Soap
My dad died back in 1969 of cancer. Shortly after his death, his mom accused my mom of having killed him. Grandma A’s reason was that mom didn’t rinse the dishes well enough. That was not the cause of his cancer, but I think about Grandma’s comment from time to time while I am washing…
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Orange Kitty
Last summer, I realized that we were feeding one particular stray cat more than the others. I’d see the cat coming into or leaving our yard quite often. I started calling the cat Orange Kitty even though OK is not the orangiest of kitties ever. More of an orange marmalade color really. I didn’t think…
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Maddie
She is a small dog with enough scrappy for a mutt five times her size. Brown, she is, with a black stripe down the middle of her back that reaches to the tip of her short tail. That tail is always wagging in its funny back and forth way. Hampered from a real good wag…
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Imperfect Beauty
Bent like an old woman’s back Nearly double Brown and dry If perfect beauty exists This is not it Often it is what is not said That is most important
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2022
I was born in the year 1952. It was early in August. If you had asked me when I was in my early teen years what I thought about the year 2000, I might have said something like: “2000? Wow. That’s a long ways off. That’s like way, way in the future. I’ll be really…
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Daria’s Tale
I finally finished the novel. Then I finally finished proofreading and editing it. Then came the uploading and the checking and the re-uploading … repeatedly. But I came to a point where I thought it was about as good as I was going to get it and I pushed the publish button. That’s always a…
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Senyru 2
As bare as are bones The trees have lost all their leaves Beauty still resides
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Stairs
Our house has stairs. It’s a two-story house. The former occupants referred to the ground level as the basement. But there is no basement. No part of our house is below ground level. There are about seven steps up to the front door. Inside the front door is an entryway/landing area that is midway between…
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Proof Copy
It’s kind of exciting and also anticlimactic when the first copy of your newest novel arrives. You spend months (sometimes much longer) agonizing over every word, how they sound and how they look. You worry at your sentence structure and how it all times out. Does it flow? Does it falter? You read it aloud…
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A Latent Approach to TMB
Do you ever wake up and hear words in your head? I do. Right upon waking. Not every morning. But often. They sound in my head as if I am actually hearing them with my ears. Usually it’s total nonsense. But now and then I’ll hear a sentence that almost makes sense, like this morning: …
Maddie's Mom Writes 