Boutique In-home Care | Newport Beach Caregivers | Kindness. Comfort. Compassion.
or select another category:
I first knew Sharon Patten sitting next to my cousin Kathe, both their heads upside down, scratching their dandruff into the folds of a magazine with Elvis booming in the background, “I’m all shook up.” Uh-huh-huh, uh-huh-huh, scratch again. Who could shed the most...
Aunt Roseanne lived in the back bedroom in my grandmother Katie’s house. Roseanne was Katie’s first cousin. Katie always had a room for anyone in need. Roseanne, by profession, a social worker and by nature, always helping others, had a need. Her husband, Pat Darnell,...
It’s so easy to remember awkward, embarrassing situations with people — laugh and forget about them. It is much harder to search through all those ordinary moments shared and find what bound us. Donald and I still laugh remembering when (we were living in Johannesburg...
My dad lost a lot. When he was two years old he lost his father who died from complications from being gassed in the trenches during the Great War. He lost his mother next, who had to go to work to support her two sons. Jack was angry at her, not understanding her...
I don’t have a photo of Inez but every time I see kelp and seaweed, I look again because of Inez. I had watched her sketching the kelp, holding her pencil like a claw, her art opening despite her arthritic fingers. Her smile was huge, scalloped like the shore despite...
“Who do you think you are, a super star, well, right you are.” That’s how my brother, Ward, was—an asterisk or a star. More than that, he was a star-giver. Everyone received his attention. As soon as he could, he explored the ‘other side of the tracks,’ the black...
Aren’t we loads of those we have lost? Take the word, loads. Every birthday card from Aunt Mary, the invalid next door, was signed, loads. I have been sending her loads ever since I learned to write my name. Here she is in the center of the picture before she became...
There was no sea there to search for pearls for a California girl, a coastal creature used to the magnificent Pacific at her feet. Instead, she had been railed into a swamp along the Mississippi Delta. Despite the barbed wire and chigger-infested woods, Tat carved...
February 21st was her birthday. I read his letters to her again, but don’t have hers. What did her letters say? Is someone reading them now, too? She turned her disasters, disappointments. Yes, turned them literally. Into something? Not necessarily. But if she...