When I was in ninth grade, a new kid moved into my neighborhood — we’ll call him “Joe” — and I was hopeful that we’d be friends. There weren’t any boys my age in the neighborhood; just two girls, and I was terrified of girls. Joe, being the new kid,...

I was sitting in the back seat of our station wagon, behind my father who was behind the wheel. My mother, riding shotgun, flipped through a magazine. My two older brothers sat beside me in the back seat. We’d been on the road for an hour and it wasn...

I decided I wanted to be a writer my second year of college. I was in the engineering school and engineering is not usually a path to literature, but, I entered the Hopwood Awards, which is a literary prize at the University of Michigan. Arthur Mille...

Did you ever have a crazy day when expectations are flipped, and just when you think one thing is going to happen, the day flips again? Of course you have. If you’re paying attention, it probably happens every day in one way or another. But sometimes...

I got a chance to visit with family during Thanksgiving and to play Euchre. If you’re not familiar, Euchre is a trick-taking card game with trump (like Bridge) using half the normal deck of cards (like Pinochle). Euchre’s one mind-bender is that the...

If you’re just tuning in, this is the third installment about my uncle’s cottage, and you can catch up with the first two here. When last we spoke, a new weather phenomenon of sustained winds raised the waters of the Sandusky Bay above flood stage, p...

Along the shores of Lake Erie and its tributaries, there is a water snake that is not venomous but it has the magical power of making me crap my pants. I don’t like snakes, and these water snakes (scientific name: Bloomer Poopers) are nasty, slitheri...