We can bridge the divide by upholding the right to vote.
The man instinctively took a seat behind the plastic divider as I discussed his voter record over the phone with someone working the Board of Elections (BOE) help desk. His tired eyes met my…

Two Words Can Unite Us

On a Sunday morning, craving a hike in Appalachia.
With street names like Bacon Flat, Tater Ridge and Plum Run, I’ve come to think of Chalet Nivale Nature Reserve as a comfort hike. And on this Sunday morning following the time change, it’s what I…

Comforted by Color at Chalet Nivale

Fever, not from COVID, but from hope.
In Norwood, I sit amidst the yawn of morning, in my bronze Venza, a car as old as my memories. The lot where I’m parked is empty. An asphalt desert engulfs me. Where once prosperity grew from a GM plant, now…

Election Training Chills

Three weeks ago, I sat around an outdoor table at a home on the Oregon Coast, visiting with friends, Franny and Jerry. Mid-conversation, my 24-year-old son said, “In case you didn’t know, she got hit by a car,” mimicking my standard lines no matter…

How to say, “I was hit by a car.”

The Rebirth of Birthdays
(Reprinted from The Art Academy of Cincinnati Literary Journal, Volume 1, Spring, 2020).
When I turned 54, my birthday passed with little of the hoopla typical in my younger years.
Friends asked how I marked the day. I used…

Innate Rebellion

We need to own this country right back.
Around my junior high years, my parents left the house before the sun emerged on Election Day. They returned “by seven, after working the polls,” the note, written in Dad’s hieroglyphics, said. When the fire…

Sounding the Alarm on Poll Workers, Small Towns

I read the Enquirer piece (‘More than just a pool’) about the lack of swimming options for city of Cincinnati residents. In light of the pandemic and our civil unrest, the pool offered a place where kids were free from quarantine of another kind. Did…

City Pools Need Lifeguards More than Ever

In Cincinnati, one lives in the city to learn from it.
A female city employee dumped beer cans, a Target bag, even a sweatshirt into the garbage truck. She returned the inner lining to inside the green metal cage and looked over at me, where I sat on…

Hope Lies at the Bottom of the Barrel

How to record an audiobook during a pandemic.
The house was empty. I climbed to the third floor, hoping for more silence than existed outside my front door. The loft at the end of the hallway had been the game room and napping headquarters. When my…

A Flashlight and Bedspread Walk into a Closet

How one resident has accepted the solitude and space of this in-between time.
There have always been befores in Over-the-Rhine.
Before the German immigrants arrived and built their sturdy brick homes…Before white flight to the suburbs left block…

The Contradictions of Over-the-Rhine

Tracking the movement of time while we are stationary.
During this period of isolation, we have been relegated to staying beneath our own roofs. We are cooking meals. We are in a shared space with our children or spouse, or locked in a room…

Journaling to Organize Our Minds

Reading page 23 of Erik Larson’s The Splendid and the Vile, I picked up my pen and underlined a phrase.
Lately, I had questioned the rudimentary documenting of my day in words, when others were confronting the coronavirus in their practice or in…

Of Mantelpieces and Pansies

caregiving / long-term care / giveaway
As someone who has cared for a mother living in a long-term care community, I know the feeling of anxiety that washes over you, when you cannot or are unable to visit your loved one.
Will they be safe? Will they…

Do You Have a Loved One in Long-Term Care?

Creating a neighborhood together
The Eagle OTR, part of the Thunderdome Group, announced they were closing their restaurants and would no longer provide carryout as of end of day, Friday, March 20, 2020.
In an effort to plan something/anything, I…

Restaurants of Over-the-Rhine Are the Kitchen Table

It was raining. A perfect evening for a movie. But not just any movie. The one I had been postponing since reading my son’s text, “…cried for two hours…he was my best friend.”
Yes, The Art of Racing in the Rain.
If my son, Davis, was finally mourning…

The Art of Being Enzo

Travel Tips / Food Fandom / Enlightenment
“Puerto Rico is a U.S. territory,” I said to the customer service rep on the other end of the phone. “I’m not traveling out of the country.”
Still, why was I even calling the credit card company to notify…

Waiting in Puerto Rico

The Art of Being Enough
It was mid-summer. As I sat in my quiet office and edited my manuscript, the dilemmas had increased instead of decreased. I shifted passages from past tense to past perfect. I changed lacked to lost when referring to my…

The Art Of Being Enough

It was summer in June when we moved to Over-the-Rhine. That’s when I first noticed her. Like a pinprick in a darkroom photograph, the first crack of day had appeared in her window and reflected back on my face. She was not one to go unnoticed. She…

How I Found My Spirit Building: Music Hall

Three Questions — and a Fourth
In which my mother finally understands my obsession with Oregon.
1.
“Where will your baby play?” my mother asked me as we stood side by side, facing wave after wave of oncoming ocean. Sand washed up over our bare feet…

Three Questions — and a Fourth

In the months since my mother died, I had been avoiding my kitchen. I perused fig, hazelnut and goat cheese salad recipes from Sunset Magazine or munched on pea shoots from the farmer’s market and declared them as sweet as honey. If all else failed,…