Tom Is producing my audiobook for BURNING WOMAN, Memoirs of an Elder. We’re in a makeshift sound studio in his office. I’m wearing headphones, reading into a microphone. Beginning on page 21, I hear my words spoken in a deep, resonant voice as it they’re bouncing off the walls of my skull. My...

Life is what happens to you while you’re busy making plans. —John Lennon We slid our two-person kayak into Drake’s Estero and, one at a time, edged into our seats butt first, as if getting into a buoyant sports car, myself in front and Tom in back. Early morning fog, cool and moist, heavy with the...

  I flipped my appointment book back to March 16, 2020. The page is covered in red ink circling the names of clients I needed to contact to schedule virtual sessions. Scrawled across the week’s calendar in purple highlighter is “COVID. I started with phone sessions, then FaceTime. Four months...

The call came in the middle of a therapy session. I let it go to voicemail. When I played back the message, a woman’s somber voice said, “Hello Sharon...I’m a friend of Helen’s. Her dementia has gotten worse. She’s unable to care for herself and has been transferred to the memory care unit. We’re...

Baking was a ritual I started after becoming housebound. I wasn’t alone. Remember early in the shut down when there were no bags of flour on grocery store shelves, no baking powder, and no yeast? In the olden days, when my children were young and money was scarce, I’d make bread. The smell is...

It's 12:50 on a Monday and there’s not enough time. I am not even sure what I’m late for. But, I can feel my heart beating rapidly and a fluttering sensation in my chest. The image of a heart with wings comes to mind, but my heart doesn’t feel like it’s taking flight. It feels caught. This is so...

Lenny, where are you? I had learned to talk to the lizard in a soft voice so I wouldn’t startle him. It was just a week ago, late afternoon, the time Lenny usually hunted for insects on the screen in my writing studio. I looked in the shady places on the window casement where he hid when the sun...

  Leaving Le Broc, Tom and I took the bullet train from Nice to Paris on tracks so close to the Mediterranean shoreline, it felt as if we were passengers on a very narrow ship, and in only a matter of time we’d turn toward the open sea. Twenty-four hours later, travelling by taxi, airplane,...

I woke up this morning with a sense of daylight, although our bedroom was filled with shadows and dreams. I wondered what time it was and padded on bare feet into my office, opening the windows to smell the dawn. It still carried the scent of rain that began the previous evening, and the clean,...