It’s 6:30 a.m. on a chilly fall day and I’m lying in bed. I hear the garage door open, then the car engine. A minute later, the garage door closes. Tim’s car pulls out of the driveway. I have 12 hours until he returns. I’m not a morning person. On cool fall days it takes me longer to force myself…
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Gramma Stella was 14½ when her mother told her that Giuseppe Monardo had asked for her. It was 1929. He was back in their Calabrian village from America, where he’d made a little money. He was now looking for a wife and, in the piazza, he’d seen Stella getting her family’s water at the fountain. “No!” she said. He was…
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“All of it?” Saverio asked again. “All of it,” came the answer from the other end of the line. “I’m sorry.” The dejected voice belonged to Saverio’s friend, Alfonso. “Maybe we can save a few gallons, but I checked all of them and they are either bad or very bad.” Saverio could not contain his disappointment, but he was not…
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I say I love being close to you with a story about a poet’s green thumb. You breathe in the leaves and feel your fingers furl/unfurl the edges of a book I’ve put in your lap, a long line of words rigged to make some sense of wonder, the pages laid out like a clearing, woodland bound and tilled, contained…
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