the latest posts tagged ‘alcoholism’
stumbling into graceland
My walk-in closet looks like an IED exploded in it: two fat piles of jeans and slacks, another of shirts and sweaters, scattered shoes I’m tripping on. There’s a rats’ nest of hangers out in the hall. I am ruthlessly culling the old or sick or awful; I have vowed to show no mercy;…
the gravity of water and mistakes
Our mother had terrible hair and not enough of it. A bad combination of fine, thin, soft and straight, she and her hairdresser bleached and rolled, ratted and pulled it into a poufy platinum ball every Friday, spraying enough lacquer on it to varnish a fair-sized coffee table. The style was Phyllis McGuire with…
Gin: It’s What’s for Dinner
I usually write about things that make me happy, so you’re probably expecting this to be about my handsome husband or music or maybe lobster and Jarlsberg potato galettes. Instead I’m serving up sadness that will drop you to your knees and the smell of bile. Sound like fun? Good. Pull up a barstool and…
Highways and Dancehalls
Disappearing into the Anthropologie catalog like Alice down the rabbit hole, I twist my grey ponytail into a knot and reach for a chipped platter with imaginary fish painted the colors of Moroccan doors. Tan forearms with garden scars, strong hands, tendoned like turkey legs, blue bumps carrying spent blood. I’d shrug at the wrinkle…
ancestry.candace
L.C. Neal posted on her blog today a piece that went on and on about her being some sort of princess with these exotic and romantic forbears, so I thought humph, maybe I should just make something up that sounds a lot better than my real story. But then I thought, you know what? It’s…
She Wore a Lapis Lazuli Necklace
Long, strong legs and arms, tan and storkily elegant, high heels, an exotic orange, yellow and blue scarf tied as a headband across her forehead, clamping down an unruly goldenbrown mane, thickly noncompliant. Brassy ear hoops, chunks of ethnic somethings in a necklace or two, blue Nordic eyes, coral lipstick. Swooping through the curves on…