the rose of kiev

I've realized a tendency of mine in writing: I hoard. My earliest memories of that need to write are found in fuzzy pictures of a 14-year-old girl, scribbling poems borne of family sadness. Writing began with and was fed by hurt. Steadily throughout high school I produced hundreds of poems, yet two months after I started dating Dave the flow of poetry ran almost completely dry and has never returned. Life had gotten better. What I mean when I say I hoard is exactly how webster defines it (also, you know you're a nerd when you have Webster.com on your favorite links). Tracing the word back down to its Old English and Gothic roots, it means"to hide treasure". And unhappiness has always compelled my pen more than happiness has; as it were I save the good memories, the treasures, for myself, reluctant to give them away to others in words. Maybe that's why I've been hesitant to post about the wedding or our honeymoon adventures in any detail... But this is somethi...

Ah, all those adolescent years of whining in celibacy when the female curse would arrive every month to inconvenience my clothing, my comfort, my life. With my life the way it is now, as a young married lady I'd like to raise my glass and say: "Thank you God for the sign of another baby-free month." Cheers.

Every birthday and Christmas since I was fourteen has been a week-long string of celebration, resulting from my family's split. The days of the week vary between mom and dad, mailed gifts from grandparents in Bradenton and packages delivered from grandparents in Akron and lunch dates with grandparents from Mansfield. In the day or two before Christmas, my siblings and I usually managed to plead my mom into allowing us one early present apiece, our choice. My sister would go for cd-case-shaped presents, my brother would go for the biggest bag addressed to him, but what I would look for were those hard rectangular gifts carefully wrapped with my mother's neat handwriting printed on the paper. In my deeply-devoted Star War days in middle school, I had requested a certain book that was one of many spin-offs from the series. When the time came for early present selection, I had already scoped it out under the fake 3-foot tree on the sidetable and ripped into it immediately. My fath...

It's hard when you want to think the best of people, and then you encounter people who are not the best. I ride the bus every day, and the unspoken rules of a bus are as follows: with pairs of seats on either side of the aisle, the first seating goal is to have one person at every window seat on the bus to not unnecessarily encroach on personal space. Then the aisle seats fill up based on judgments of who a non-issue seatmate would be, and when standing room is all that remains all boundaries of personal bubbles are popped by necessity. Once when riding a bus to school on a Thursday afternoon, I had an encounter with one of the "not best" kind. Upon boarding the bus the seating situation was at stage one, so I found myself a window and pulled out my math homework for a quick review before my test. Stage two brought a friendly middle-aged black man into the aisle seat next to me. After a strange conversation that involved a lot of questions of my athletic history and more...