There was a time in my life when beauty meant something special to me. I guess that would have been when I was about six or seven years old, just several weeks or maybe a month before the orphanage turned me into an old man. I would get up every morn...
This is allegedly actual text from an American home economics text book, circa 1950. Have dinner ready. Plan ahead, even the night before, to have a delicious meal on time. This is a way of letting him know you've been thinking about him and concerne...
A short while ago when life was simple and all that mattered was friends and having fun. There were two sisters that lived life just as gracefully as possible. There names were Carlie and Mary Jane they were liked by everyone but something just wasn'...
Sometimes I really doubt whether there is love between my parents. Every day they are very busy trying to earn money in order to pay the high tuition for my brother and me. They dont act in the romantic ways that I read in books or I see on TV. In th...
It wasnt a tarpaper shack to Emily, it was Home. As far as she was concerned, it was Heaven. With her feet up on the front porch railing, relaxing at the close of a long day, she could still smell the tar. Shed insisted on a front porch, no matter ho...
The waterfall behind our house at the lower end of Lake Edenwold is a thundering cascade of spring runoff from the melting snows of winter. It's been a three-week drum roll leading up to today, when the cymbal will crash and the earth will arrive at...
There was a king who had twelve beautiful daughters. They slept in twelve beds all in one room and when they went to bed, the doors were shut and locked up. However, every morning their shoes were found to be quite worn through as if they had been da...
A little girl had been shopping with her Mom in Wal-Mart. She must have been 6-years-old, this beautiful red-haired, freckle-faced image of innocence. It was pouring outside. The kind of rain that gushes over the top of rain gutters, so much in a hur...
Several years ago, while attending a communications course, I experienced a most unusual process. The instructor asked us to list anything in our past that we felt ashamed of, guilty about, regretted, or incomplete about. The next week he invited par...
He was driving home one evening, on a two lane country road. Work in this small mid-western community, was almost as slow as his beat-up Pontiac. But he never quit looking. Ever since the factory closed, he'd been unemployed, and with winter raging o...
She was six years old when I first met her on the beach near where I live. I drive to this beach, a distance of three or four miles, whenever the world begins to close in on me. She was building a sandcastle or something and looked up, her eyes as bl...
There was once upon a time an old goat who had seven little kids, and loved them with all the love of a mother for her children. One day she wanted to go into the forest and fetch some food. So she called all seven to her and said: 'Dear children, I...
I have a friend who is falling in love. She honestly claims the sky is bluer. Mozart moves her to tears. She has lost 15 pounds and looks like a cover girl. I'm young again! she shouts exuberantly. As my friend raves on about her new love, I've taken...
I like the subtle fresh green budding from the branches of the tree -- the herald of spring, ushering in the dawn... I like the subtle flow of cloud that makes the sky seem even more vast, azure and immense... I like the subtle wind. In spring, it st...
When I was fifteen, I announced to my English class that I was going to write and illustrate my own books. Half the students sneered, the rest nearly fell out of their chairs laughing. Dont be silly, only geniuses can become writers, the English teac...
