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A Turkey Trot

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The sound of ominous gobbling filled the skies, and I buried my face deeper into my jacket collar.  The school bus would drop my daughter off at any moment, but I was preoccupied. My stance at the corner was a cower, my nervous gaze darting left to right.  The wild turkeys were on the move.  The gobbles bounced off the trees and homes, off the eight broke down cars in the driveway of the corner yellow house.  I used to side eye that house anxiously, wondering about the comings and goings of the literally 16 people who lived inside of it, some of whom drove on the front lawn in order to access the garage. Today, my nosy ass didn't care.  Today, it was all about the gang of roaming birds that had recently descended unto our neighborhood, numbering no less than twenty. My hands tapped against my thighs.  I was agitated.  My eleven year old son had screamed a surprising fact at me a few days ago when the turkeys had abruptly lurched into our front yard whi...
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And If You See My Reflection In The Snow Covered Hills / Well, The Landfill Will Bring It Down

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A few years ago, well into my adulthood, my father said he had a gift for me.  He handed me a tiny pink box, and I immediately waged silent guesses as to what could be in it.  A golden pendant passed down six generations from the old country?  A key to a lockbox in the Swiss Alps or even the local Chase branch?  Maybe a check with a lot of commas, made out to me and folded up tightly as to fit in the tiny box.  I could use a check, as I'd recently lost track of a 401K and was beginning to believe I'd never find it.  Oops. I cracked open the box, and then rattled its contents around in bewilderment.  Were those...? "Your baby teeth," he proclaimed.  "Every last one of them." So much for the check, the lockbox key, or the old country pendant.  My sister and I exchanged glances, like we always did whenever our dad handed over something random that he'd come across in the deep, dark recesses of our childhood home.  Old progress reports from ...
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Lured In

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Alex embraced a new hobby this past summer.  This one fits right into his overall 60 year old white man vibe of classic rock, bowling, and what appears to be moderate to severe psoriasis.  Actually, the doctor told us the disgusting rash he developed on both legs was most likely folliculitis aggravated by too much hot tubbing one weekend- yet another 60 year old white man pursuit. It's fishing.  His best friend Matthew got him into it because Matthew's grandma lives by a stocked lake in a bougier part of Lake County.  I've seen random kids fishing in the smaller ponds of our own non-bougie area, but all they ever seem to catch are Miller Lite bottles and the occasional patch of folliculitis.  Actually, it's nice where I live- we are minutes away from a plethora of beaches. I always tell my kids how lucky we are to live here.  When I was growing up, we went to the beach maybe once a summer, and it involved crossing over to the dark side (Indiana). ...
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Time Traveling The Easy Way

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And in a flash, it's six years later.  I'm 44 years old, slathering enough retinol on my face each night to burn off the most amount of skin cell layers I can until I'm in danger of showing bone.  There's some hair dye involved, and my contact lenses are multi-focals.  That means that my eyes are more focalled than they were before, from near to intermediate to kind of far to way back in time to a less cruel decade.  Chris is doing fine, or at least that's what he likes to tell me in between back pain winces and handfuls of ibuprofen.  He's a reassuring sort, that Chris B.  Somebody has to be in a marriage. I'll flip out over the day to day snags and snarls along with the litany of things that could completely go wrong at any given moment and Chris, Chris will give a half shrug and go about his evening. What have we done in the six years since I've given up blogging?  Well let's see.  There was a pandemic; that was kind of awful.  Millions of...
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Crazy Day Ever!

I've lost the desire to blog.  I'm compelled to keep writing so that Emily has as many stories about herself to one day read as the boys do, but whenever I sit down to write, I just don't have it in me.  It's not that I've run out of material, per se, because children- all children- are endless fountains of humor and amusement.  It's just that it's started to feel repetitive.  This mommy blog thing is so played out.  The couple of mom bloggers I follow online generally follow the same sort of formula.  Kids are annoying, and we also drink wine.  I'm in the trenches with an army of beautiful morons.  Or it's a humble brag of winning at motherhood. That kind of thing. So what do people think when they read *my* blog?  I've become hyper aware of that question over the past year, which is partially why I haven't written.  What do they think about ME?  That question becomes more nuanced when you whittle down your audience.  To ...
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Cast Away!

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Would you believe Alex broke his arm again?  It's six weeks later, and he just traded in his awkwardly angled cast for a spiffy new brace, the kind that bowlers wear.  I will not be taking Alex bowling any time soon, of course, for fear of resnapping his arm bones.  "That's the biggest complication we see with these type of breaks," Alex's doctor has said many times.  "It takes a year for the bones to fully strengthen and straighten.  Rebreaking is a major concern."  His doctor relayed the same story twice, giving me the uneasy impression that he's only had one other patient besides Alex.  Another young boy broke both his radius and ulna at the playground, same as Alex.  Six weeks after the cast coming off, he got smacked in the arm with a flying soccer ball.  Bam!  Forearm broken again!  Sucks to be that guy. What fun!  An ambulance ride. Everybody knows how Alex broke his arm.  Every stranger and semi-stranger who ...
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Chip Off The Old Block!

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"I'm going to win!  I'm going to win!"  Emily raced alongside me in the rain, giggling and threatening to beat me to the entrance of the library.  I was holding her backpack, my purse, the bag of library books, and her pink puppy.  We were neck and neck in our fake race, and then her feet tangled up in their unstrapped shoes.  Down she went, hitting her face on the concrete steps.  The howl was immediate and terrible, and I knew what I would see before even dropping to my knees and looking.  A mouthful of brilliant red blood.  Shattered, jagged front teeth.  A shaking little girl, in pain and scared. Oh my God.  Oh my God.  I juggled all of the things, including Emily, wiping blood from her face to the front of her jacket while digging through the backpack- no wait, my purse- looking for my phone, which would not turn on or work right, which did not contain the programmed number of the dentist, which did not have sufficient Wi-Fi ...
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