Small Square of Light
(for Pamela; it was always for you) My new understanding of ghosts began in a Red Roof Inn in Indiana with the whiskey-wet taste of love like I’d never felt so strongly before, never felt at all before, in fact. Winter wind scratching at the glass, its banshee wail spreading across the sleepless plains while we sat in the floor between the two full-sized beds, warm heat blowing from the heater under the window, and we talked between tasting the liquor on each other’s lips — talked of the snow and the gas station coffee, of the restroom keys chained to bricks, of the lone abandoned...
Read MoreLooking Down from a Ski Chair
The world looks different from a ski chair, and everyone feels different moving through the air. This ride up Todd Mountain at the Sun Peaks Ski Resort in British Columbia, Canada, will take approximately eight minutes. I will rise 780 meters, according to the trail guide in my zipped pocket. Loading and unloading from a chairlift are always harrowing moments. If you get things wrong, it’s awfully embarrassing. I slide onto this quad chair with no problem, but it requires faith to board a ski chairlift when it’s a cloudy day at the bottom and one can’t see the summit of the mountain...
Read MoreNarrow Escapes
Sixty years ago, I narrowly escaped a tortured death. Time, the great healer, has failed to eradicate its memory from my heart. Many times during the night, while I’m sleeping, my dreams flash back to the visions of that horrible scene, and I feel the scorching heat from the tongues of the flames which dance around me. The yells and screams of the Muslim mobs and the cries of our women and children pierce my heart. Drenched in sweat and shivering, I get up from my bed and try to divert my mind to pleasant thoughts and forget the past. However, this scene, etched in my subconscious...
Read MoreCourage
Transcribed from the recently discovered memoir of the late Alonzo Cushing Introduction and transcription by Donna Marie Miller and Adam David Miller Sifting through information on a subject completely different, the 1825 visit of General Lafayette to the little country village of Fredonia, New York, I came upon an interesting entry in the minutes of the Fredonia Scientific and Historical Society, circa 1863. Here at the Barker Historical Museum we get many, many book researchers, who want to see our Civil War collection, and who are extremely excited about anything at all that we can...
Read MoreJane Eyre and Alice
When my mom died, one of the things that nobody else wanted was a copy of Charlotte Bronte’s novel, Jane Eyre, that had been given to my grandmother when she was twelve. I had always been fascinated by my maternal grandmother, Alice, because my mom didn’t remember her much, and she looked so pretty in her wedding picture. My mom looked more like her father, who had huge laughing eyes and a long face. What prettiness she did have was inherited from that lovely, innocent bride who looked at us so sweetly from the sepia-toned wedding portrait. Although her beauty was...
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