My husband comes home from the grocery store and tells me that everyone’s baking bread these days, why is everyone baking bread? All his friends are swapping pictures of baking bread and these friends are males in their early 30s and they are all home, quarantined, baking bread. I tell him that yes, I’ve seen [...]
An overheard conference call: Wake up at the same time you always did on a normal work day, take a shower like normal, get dressed like normal, keep the same hours you normally did, invest in your space at home. This could be our new normal for a very long time. I can't help but [...]
My mom warned me it would happen: she said, again and again, one day you will wake up and he will be bigger than you. So this day she said would come, this growth spurt of my little brother, well, I don't need to tell you this. But I will. It happened. For the majority [...]
This post is part of a new project that I’m working on. Visit Jess Alston’s website to learn more about the Dig Deep Podcast. I’m officially the least qualified person to write this post. For the last six months, I’ve been praying for something pretty specific. It felt like an eternity of hearing silence mixed with static. [...]
She skipped town for the weekend and left a Tupperware container on the counter filled with chocolate chip cookies. She had stayed up late one night baking them, clanging baking sheet after clanging baking sheet I heard downstairs at an unusual hour, said it was really only a recipe from the back of the chocolate [...]
I overheard the teenage girl lamenting her new lifeguard duties at a quiet pool. How is lifeguarding going? Are you loving it?, asked the neighbor, who seemed expectant of reports of contentment with youthful summer bliss. Surely, the girl's bronzed skin and luscious locks had prepared for 16 years for a job of this Baywatch caliber. It's [...]
Today, I am mad. I am mad because I woke up on the wrong side of the bed, and I refused to make an effort to roll over to the right side and try again. I am mad because the coffee beans spilled out of the coffee maker and into the dirty sink when [...]
Today, I woke up at 4 a.m. with a fever, that Heat Miser yet Snow Miser feeling of crawling out of your own skin where you trip over everything in the dark just to make it to the bottle of Motrin. I knew right away what was happening: this is my autoimmune body saying, Please, I am [...]
"It's kind of funny," I said to my coworker. "When I first started grad school, I came home with bags busting of great stuff from Whole Foods, right off my high as a working woman. And then it wasn't long before I learned how to put in a quarter to use a cart at Aldi's." I [...]
This is a story about getting locked out. Now, that makes this sound like someone else did this locking out to me. We might learn that's far from the truth by the end of this story. Or we might learn that it's all about the wording. Like every good story, you (as the reader) want [...]
