On Loma Vista Street, my writing space started out on a desk my father-in-law had found in his Johnstown, Pennsylvania, alley and refinished. I pushed it up against a window in the corner of our bedroom in 2002 and wrote nearly every day, a lifetime of words finally...
Jim trudged up the worn carpet steps of Fern’s, the Ashland, Ohio, boarding house where he lived while attending seminary. The steps creaked as he shrugged off his coat and the icy one a.m. air that clung to it. Downstairs, housemate Tom McConahay, his partner in...
Good-bye Girl, was the name of the movie Jim and I watched on our first date—a moniker I could have worn myself. I’d strung the elastic string of a candy necklace with crushes, adding and subtracting infatuations on a weekly basis. My affections were sweet, shallow,...
I marched, oblivious, through my first date with Jim as though it were no big deal—gritting my Florida-grown teeth against the frigid February First Ohio night. My fists jammed into the pockets of my coat. I trudged the ribbon of shoveled cement, snow glittering at...
When I met the man who would own my heart forever, I thought something in me would stand up and cheer. But it didn’t happen that way. I sat Indian style on the floor of the packed living-dining room of the Alpha Theta House in September 1978 at Ashland College in...
I looked up from the front desk of Amstutz Hall at the coeds and frat guys funneling through the glass doors into the glare of the lobby lights. The scents of bonfire and beer drifted toward me as I reached for the girls’ keys in the mailboxes behind me. They hovered...
