In May, Giovanni Toti, the governor of Liguria, Italy, stunned Italians around the world by saying older people were dispensable “to the productive effort” of Italy’s economy.
His quote originated from the challenge of keeping older adults at home…

The Importance of Individuality in Caregiving

A former food and arts editor, collage artist, and soulful friend, Sara knew how to draw out the light.
In 2017, in the middle of a hushed January night, my husband dropped me off in a parking lot behind the Mariemont Theatre. I boarded a bus teaming…

The Spark in Sara Caswell-Pearce

I stood on a green yoga mat in my office, which due to the pandemic, had also been turned into a storage room. Stretching my cold arms in warrior pose, a pose designed for concentration, I felt everything in my life move out of focus. Reading one of…

Decluttering Our Lives

Still Point Arts Quarterly Winter 2020, No. 40

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

It’s Sunday night two weeks after daylight savings time has ended. I’ve performed my usual weekend routines—taking a long walk, folding laundry, paying bills, and cooking a meal of chicken cacciatore. Drying the dishes, my hands begin to tremble. I…

Do We All Experience Sundowning?

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

Pauline Boss was raised in an immigrant community in Wisconsin. Growing up, she recalled how her parents, who came to the United States in the early 1900’s, often felt a profound sense of separation from their families back in Switzerland.
In most…

Acknowledging our Ambiguous Losses in Order to Heal

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

While we’re at home now more than ever, food and its preparation deliver vitamins and comfort to us as we slide into colder months. They also reveal stories about who we are, even when we forget how to cook.
In 1983, famed cookbook author, Paula…

Annette J. Wick - Food to Fight Off Memory Loss

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…