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...
Superstitious Friends By Ann Lee Miller From the end of my street, I see the Superstition Mountains run skyward, Stalwart sisters, draped in haze and the color blue— A hue I’ve never seen them wear. After decades of daily acquaintance, their beauty...
El Pintor, the newspapers called him—an unschooled muralist—never Paul, the guy who lived in his wiry body beneath a thatch untamed hair. Thirty-six years old. He made a living off his art. Damn lucky, his buddy Axel called him. Axel who’d married Mara when he wasn’t...
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...
