In a long marriage couples communicate in so many ways, often in silence. In recent years I rise very early and now leave post-it notes

I was warm and toasty, curled up, napping in amniotic fluid, without a worry when suddenly

What if your parents had never met had never married had never yelled at each other

Hearts are stopping faster than usual among people I know and people I don’t married to other people

Cardinals bicker and knock seed from the feeder. Doves parade below. Donal Mahoney

Months roar by like weeks and weeks disappear like days, two coots in a bar admit on New Year’s Eve, reminiscing over a beer

Rhoda, I can’t say why Amanda was picked and not Tiffany for anchor of our Nightly News. I interviewed both because Mr. Smith wanted

Around his navel this morning a halo, a red stipple Hopkins would love: “Glory be to God for dappled thin… It’s a gift from this woman

Grandma Gretchen’s in her rocker and she has something to say. She tells a visitor, a young man from the city, if he plans to write a book about life on a farm in the Fifties, he likely...

It’s not the same as seeing the po… in Bangladesh on PBS and hearing Gwen or Judy tell us about them b… the poor in Bangladesh scream in s… brown and gaunt and hollow-eyed.

How many times have I said I’m through teasing myself, through pretending I don’t enjoy the wreath of a woman

Harvey at 80 is losing his hearing. He can’t hear his wife when she talks, a symphony lost.

What if after Browne has gone one of us discovers who Browne was… leads the rally to his room before the maid has time to broom the web… retrieve from underneath the bed

I told my wife the other night when she came back to bed my feet were cold so now’s the time for me to tell her not to bury me or burn me

A tractor trailer with slats and m… pulls up at a city slaughterhouse. The driver pulls the wrong lever and two thousand pounds of trotting cattle go for an easy