I wear a mask when we walk the dogs and when I see someone approaching a block away, I cross the street. I haven’t been in a store or a restaurant since March 13th. I wash the mail, well, not really. I let it sit in the front hall for…

Bernie Sanders isn’t alone in wondering if a woman can be elected president of the United States. I’ve wondered the same thing. I’ve said the same thing: I don’t think a woman can be elected president. I think Hillary Clinton’s loss had an enormous amount to do with her being…

You can wish all you want, rail against the injustice of the locked door, commiserate with all your locked-out friends, none of that will matter. The door will stay locked until you ring the bell. But it isn’t easy ringing the bell. You have to walk up to the house…

I’ve spent the last few weeks trying to convince people to give my little organization, Time of the Month Club, money to buy homeless women tampons and pads which, once used, will be heaved into some landfill along with disposable diapers and other unpleasant detritus of lives lived in the…

I heard our local police chief refer to homeless people as an eyesore. An eyesore. Like a junkyard, like old wet carpet piled at the curb, like boarded up, burned out buildings on main street. Living breathing people seen as an eyesore. He wasn’t speaking about his department’s official policy…

Once, while she was sitting in a chair in my living room, I reached out and touched a Black woman’s hair. At that moment and without thinking about it in any way, my hand was drawn to her hair, its airiness and resilience. I patted her hair a few times…

I have a writing life. I’m no Stephen King but I have a writing life. One that I think about a lot — how much am I writing, is my writing any good, does it matter? My big accomplishment this year on my blog is that everything posted has been…

I haven’t written about it for a long time. When I wrote about it, it was still oddly fresh, even though it had happened so many years before. That’s what the first telling is always like. After the first time I wrote about my illegal abortion, I walked down the…

Lake Superior is very cold. Today, the surface temperature of the lake in front of our house in Grand Marais, Michigan, was between 54 and 56 degrees according to the Great Lakes Coastal Forecasting System. By the end of August, the water will be warmer. By Labor Day, it will…