Columns

Last night, the thumbnail moon and shimmering Venus stole my extra night of Leap Day’s sleep to count my blessings. I recalled the four Thursdays in February, thankful for safety to and from a memoir class. The thermostat fell the lowest, and snow piled the highest...

The very moment my mother took her last breath I was on the phone with the hospice nurse, but I was unable to talk. Just 10 minutes prior, I witnessed a miracle right there in her apartment. As she lay on the hospital bed hospice had set up for her, labored in her...

Today, February 21, the sky shines crystal clear upon Herman McCoy’s account of my birthday-or better said, my birthnight. On foot, my uncle rounded the last curve between Freeburn, Kentucky, and his home in the McCoy Bottom. A heart light with love from courting...

“Maggie wants to expand the garden this spring,” Jack said with a smile. A truck driver for thirty-seven years, you can’t call Jack a slacker. Here in the depth of February, he’s happy as a tick on an old coon dog. The surgeon gave him two new hips last November, and...

In February 1995, my father called. Caution threw up a hand. This wasn’t about my birthday. “Dad?” “You don’t know who this is?” he said in his belittling tone. “I didn’t expect you to call. You usually drop by. Are you okay?” “I need you to drive me to St. John’s...

Sometimes, I will not have walked 10 yards before the next invitation into someone’s house. It has happened so often that the motions have sort of become joyfully repetitive. I remove my shoes and step through the colorful, low-hanging doorway, sit on the raised bed...

My mom called Heaven her home. “Have you ever felt like you don’t really belong, that this Earth really isn’t your home?” she had asked me just months before she died. “No, not really,” I replied. I didn’t know exactly what she meant. My mother was a bit eccentric...

Libraries call my name wherever I travel. Our forefathers speak their history and literature-what mattered most, why they invested their means and talents to build a house of books and letters for posterity. I recall the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. Weeks after...

Editor’s note: The following is an excerpt from Paula’s book, Signs of Life After Death: A True Story. This is part one of four. One of life’s great mysteries is what really happens when we die. No one has been able to give me a definitive answer. If it’s true that we...