Poetic License

My daughter is not of this earth anymore, but she has come to me in dreams since she died in 2009. Dreams are funny things. They can be nonsensical, or they can be vivid, or even prophetical. The women in my family tend to dream in strange ways. One of my grandmothers saw those who… Continue reading

There is literal snow on my rooftop this morning. The flakes are coming down thick and fast outside the window of my Maryland home. It’s beautiful. I never tire of the look of it and the silence that accompanies it. Growing up in Texas, I saw exactly one snowfall in my time there–1974. We made… Continue reading

While I was studying for my undergrad degree — as a working adult — I encountered the author who would change the way I looked at the world. I was already a fan of Steinbeck, Hemingway, King (Stephen), T.H. White, and poets such as Dylan Thomas, Emily Dickinson, and Maya Angelou, among others. But I… Continue reading

I have worked since I was 13. That summer I worked for my father at his building supply. He was an entrepreneur who built a large construction business from nothing. We moved to Houston from south Georgia when I was a toddler, and he started working first as a carpenter, then as his own boss.… Continue reading

That is the best advice I received as I started out on the cancer road last spring. It might sound like hollow advice to you, something a person tosses around casually these days, but it truly gave me something to hang onto during the worst days. Rather than being an idiom on a plaque in… Continue reading

A few weeks ago, I lost my friend Jordan. He was going through treatment for cancer at the same time as me, and we really leaned on each other and talked through all our hopes and fears while enduring difficult treatment. I was on Adriamycin and Cytoxan, plus a bunch of steroids and antinausea drugs.… Continue reading