We feature new essays every Wednesday; make it a weekly habit to stop by and be enchanted by our eclectic content.
This week’s essay, “My Grandmother’s Secret”: secretive, shocking, and a sad, vital reminder.
Weekly Featured Essay
My Grandmother’s Secret
by Lee Jeffers Brami
When I was in my early twenties, my grandmother Annie told me a true story about her childhood that I never forgot. I had read her brief memoir about life as a child in the small Kentucky village where she was born, and I was charmed by it. So was the editor of her town’s local paper, which published her story.
But the paper left out one part of that story, published in 1969. The incident they left out happened when she was seven—in 1897. That story has haunted me ever since, just as it haunted her.
My grandmother was a born storyteller. She could transfix me as a child with stories about Br’er Rabbit and Br’er Fox. She could recite “’Twas the Night Before Christmas” better than anyone. And when I was very young, she sang me lullabies in her rich alto voice, making me feel, as she used to say, quoting Robert Browning, that “God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the World.”
I can still hear the lilt of her Southern voice, although it’s been fifty years since I last heard it, saw her smile, and smelled the delicate scent of her rosewater cologne. Her infectious laugh warmed me, wrapping the two of us together in a conspiracy of close family friendship.
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Just One
by Doug Canter
Not so long ago, I could toil through a sixty-hour work week, hike the Billy Goat Trail on Saturday, and consume several glasses of Silver Palm at Lia’s with my wife on Saturday night. But people decline physically much like an old car wears out. Identifying with precision the moment of change is difficult. For me, the evolution was revealed through a series of reflections: the former neighbor who didn’t recognize me walking down the street; the middle-aged woman who called me sir in the grocery store; the Dunkin Donuts cashier who rang me up with the senior discount without asking my age; and, most recently, the students who asked me, gently, when I’m going to retire.
Two Januarys ago, I lay in cubicle 10 at the emergency room of Suburban Hospital, the same space where my father had received medical care eight years ago before his passing. My wife, a doctor, two nurses, and five EMT professionals viewed the monitor behind my left shoulder. A constant and uneven beeping penetrated the room from there. Intravenous tubes extended like small hoses from my forearms. Like an out of synch orchestra, my heart rate had suffered three different kinds of arrythmias, beating almost four times its normal rate, well over two hundred beats per minute.
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Scaled: What We Gain, and What We Lose
by Deborah Svec-Carstens
Naked, I step on the digital scale and wait for the flashing red zeros to settle on a number. My number. After a few seconds, it appears. Two pounds lighter than when I stood here a few days ago.
“Oh, what a lovely surprise,” I say to myself.
I’m not trying to lose weight. Pulling the scale out from under the bathroom sink is no longer a daily ritual. But thirty years after completing treatment for anorexia, I still feel a familiar rush of pleasure as I step off the scale and get dressed.
When did I start measuring my self-worth by a number?
*
I can learn from the word “scale.” It comes from a noun derivative of the Proto-Germanic word skæla, “to split, divide,” and German or Dutch words meaning bowl, dish, cup, or shell. This etymology reflects the use of a split shell as a pan for weighing in the earliest scales, which date back to around 2000 BC in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley. These were used primarily for commerce. A divided self. One part focuses on a number. The other knows she is more than this.
The Day We All Fell Down
by Sharman Ober-Reynolds
I woke in the early morning of February 20, 2025, with a feeling of dread. Our president had just called Zelensky a dictator and claimed Ukraine started the war with Russia, not the other way around. I tried box breathing and reciting all the US states in alphabetical order. Still, I couldn’t get back to sleep, so I finished reading James by Percival Everett instead. A harrowing and darkly humorous reimagining of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, the novel reminded me of rascals in our past. Of course, we have scoundrels in the present, too. It’s hard to avoid them. I learn about their shenanigans 24/7 on the radio, TV, and the internet.
Eventually, I dropped off and slept fitfully until my alarm woke me to a chill Utah morning. I wasn’t feeling too perky. After twenty minutes of stomach cramps, I was heading back to our bed when everything went black. I slumped to the ground. This is only the second time I’d fainted in seventy years. For a while, I lay senseless in my red flannel pajamas next to our collie-poodle, Lizzie. She was coiled like a doughnut on her cushion. When I came to, she nudged me with her wet leather nose, amused that I had joined her on the floor.
My husband shuffled in and asked, “Should I call someone?” His Parkinson’s makes it hard for him to sleep, and he’d been up since dawn.
“No, I’ll just rest a little longer.” It was surprisingly comfortable on the carpet.
When I roused myself, Steven was heading my way. He has a tendency to tilt forward on his toes when pushing his walker as if he is leaning into gale-force winds. He’d tucked an aluminum glass into the zippered pouch under his walker. His kindness, along with a long drink of cold water, revived me. I showed no signs of an infection, suffered no weird allergies, had no changes in medication, was not a victim of irritable bowel syndrome or inflammatory bowel disease. The news was making me sick.
Hello Again
by Alexander Carver
“Mom, if that’s you, I want you to buzz into my right ear. Did you hear me, Mom? My right ear.”
I had just filled the gas tank to my rental car, a Ford something or other, and was surprised to find that the same little black-eyed fly that appeared inside the SUV the day of Mom’s funeral had survived the cold November night to pay me another visit. I was driving through the West Chester countryside, about a mile from Wellington, the retirement village where my parents had recently surrendered to senior living. A few moments after I’d spoken to the fly, it lifted from its sunlit perch on the dashboard, zigzagged around the inside of the car, and landed on my stubbly right cheek. I then watched in the rearview mirror in amazement as it took the short hop through the air to grant my wish and buzz into my right ear. At that fifty-mile-an-hour moment, I was fortunate that the white, French Chateau-styled buildings of Wellington appeared in the windshield, preventing my shock and delight from endangering myself and other drivers.
I swerved into the visitor’s parking lot and searched for a space that faced away from the front entrance and any eyes I preferred not to witness my unusual behavior. I parked between two sedans, checked to see if anyone was lounging in either one, and made a second request of the fly…
Birds of a Feather
by Andreia Rodrigues
The classroom walls blurred, shrank, and pressed my head from all sides. The teacher’s voice became a rottweiler’s bark. The air was sucked out of the room. I gasped, the skin on my face feverish. So humiliating. The sweat, the heavy breathing, the shivers. These stupid, stupid attacks had started months ago and showed no signs of abating. They followed me everywhere, invisible and relentless, like a shadow I couldn’t shake.
I held on and trembled through the lecture, my notes forming uneven patterns on a white page. At the first break, I got the hell out of that airless classroom.
Midday found me sobbing in a park near the university. The shame had followed me to a bench covered by the falling leaves of a Tipuana tree. I sat down, brought my backpack close to my chest, and closed my eyes. Tears ran freely down my cheeks. “Can I sit here with you?” A soft voice broke through the curtain of my exasperation. The request came from an old man, a familiar figure in the park, who, according to rumours, had renounced possessions to live voluntarily from charity.
Speaking of the Dead
by Chris Vrountas
I am a grandson of immigrants from what some might have called a “shithole country.” My grandparents were poor, from poor villages, from a poor part of the world. They were not just data points wrapped in olive skin speaking a foreign language and cooking funny smelling food. They were husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, sons and daughters, laborers and artists, lovers and mourners, leaders and failures, fighters and dreamers. They were people, like all other people. Yet, like immigrants today, my family and others similarly situated were viewed upon their arrival in the US by some American leaders as “new immigrants” who threatened to make “a great and perilous change in the very fabric of our race,” as Henry Cabot Lodge, the Senator from my home state, once wrote over 100 years ago. Sadly, very little has changed.
My immigrant grandparents are all dead now. But they continue to whisper to me. They tell me to open my eyes and open my heart. Listening to their whispers, I see the new arrivals at the southern border through their eyes. I see the threat to suspend habeas corpus through their eyes. I see the denial of personhood and citizenship guaranteed under the Fourteenth Amendment through their eyes. I see the pretextual complaint about “illegal immigration” through their eyes while their descendants demand changes to laws to keep new immigrants out of the country immigrants built. Looking through their eyes, I share their terror at seeing immigrants who have committed no crimes taken off the street in surprise arrests.
To Star Y, BioFather
by Beth Cleary
To Star Y:
This letter hails you in the outer reaches of my firmament. You throb there but are not visible, will never be visible—like a boson star collapsed into nothingness but still exerting gravitational pull. My words pour through my fingers and, for the first time, I give you a name—Star Y—and sense the nearly imperceptible tether threading me, mortal daughter, to you, far gone not-father, hapless and possibly violent co-maker of me.
I think often of the constellations in my sky. Parents, of course, they who adopted me, now each again of the stars. I wouldn’t say I’m guided by them, as some say of stars, but they gave me the sextants, sights for navigating this life. Now gone and dim, their tow still startles me: mother’s quick gait in a stranger’s walk, father’s kind voice at the grocery store, Ramblin’ Rose on the oldies station. When I pick up a hammer, my father hefts the tool. When I set a table, my mother worries where the spoons go. They are polestars in my Alpha Centauri. Family, friends, dogs, teachers who’ve left this world—they are there, too, brightest on anniversary days and seasons, sometimes whizzing like comets through my heart when I hear a certain song, pass a particular restaurant, see an idle fetch ball in the garden. Here below, gravity holds me alongside beloved husband, sister, friends, earthly stars. I twirl, tend, and cry with them. Like all stars, they contain light and reflect it beyond themselves. Like all stars, except the failed ones, they are life itself.
