Posts tagged Family
Rising

On an early evening during our first pandemic winter, I closed my laptop and commuted from my home office upstairs to our kitchen below. Another day of quarantine, another at-home meal to prepare for my family. That afternoon I had kneaded pizza dough and left it to rise inside the corner cabinet, warmed by the heating duct that runs beneath it. Now, the plaid kitchen towel draped over the bowl puffed above the rim, like the fabric below the empire waist of a maternity dress.

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Exempt Human Specimens

According to the United States Postal Service website, it’s illegal to send body parts through the mail.

“Heavily restricted,” is a better way to put it. You need the necessary permits, containers, a transport license from the American Association of Mortuary Shippers. There are rules involved, special restrictions; same goes for dry ice and lithium batteries. You can mail live bees, but not medical marijuana. Those thin, translucent lines that keep us from stuffing a toe into a manila envelope on the way to work.

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Murmuration

I was on my hands and knees trying to hide a twelve-piece dinner set under my single bed when I heard Mum calling from the bedroom next door. She’d been in bed for two days, suffering from either a bad back or codeine withdrawals. I pushed the crockery behind a box of stainless steel cutlery and some gingham tea towels I’d bought from Woolworth’s the day before.

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The Royalty of Brooklyn

Grandma Helen was my fancy grandmother. Born in 1909, she was the firstborn child of Julius and Mary Nelson’s five children. Her tall, blue-eyed father liked to tell her that her birth brought him luck. After Grandma arrived, Julius went from selling newspapers on the Lower East Side to learning the trade in his wife’s family’s coat business.

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