We say hi, hi, how are you, good, how are you? I don’t think she answers. And if she does, it’s a muttered fine or a shrug of her lips as she looks away. I comment on the weather with the mail of mostly coupons for oil changes and credit card invitations in my hand, [...]
It’s the middle of 2020 and I’m writing a grocery list for my husband. He has been shopping for our groceries since the day we all realized how people sneeze all over carts then abandon it for the next set of gullible hands. Sometimes I save our grocery lists and I mix them in with [...]
In our house, taking out the trash involves scooping cat litter and adding a week’s worth of poop to our trash. This is usually my husband’s chore. Today, I decide to help my stressed-out husband who is in back-to-back meetings at the office. He says he doesn’t have enough time to take sips of water [...]
My husband replies, “What?” like a reflex after 98% of what I say. This isn’t something new for me. My entire life, my mom would read warnings from my teachers on slips of paper tucked inside our take-home folders, “Ashley is very sweet, but she really needs to speak up or her grade will drop.” [...]
There’s a shortage of dumbbells. Here’s a list of things I never thought I would care about: Dumbbells.A shortage of dumbbells.How to acquire dumbbells on the black market. I’m home, every day I’m home, and I’m fast approaching my one-year anniversary of spending every single day at home doing whatever one does while they’re at [...]
A seemingly innocent email from the United States Postal Service when we moved: Do you want to sign up for Informed Delivery? Sure, I thought, it will be nice to know what’s coming. Every day, I open an email with photos of what’s arriving (or not arriving) in my mailbox that day, a scanned digital [...]
In case you’re wondering, our garden is still growing weeds. I’m learning that this is how it goes (so they say): you pull the weeds, they’re gone; then the weeds grow back, and you’re down in the dirt again. My mom hands me my new gardening gloves, tells me to get back to pulling weeds. [...]
The two best friends know this already, in fact, they’ve had more than 60 years of learning that there are things you just can’t plan for, like how many days you’ll spend playing nurse after the other recovers from surgery, for instance, but this one, well, this one is a new one: spending the day [...]
Every month, I hope that I will wake up changed, a new woman, suddenly transformed into the thoughtful person I want to be—the friend who remembers birthdays. It’s sort of like how every day, my cat climbs on the back of my reclining zero gravity chair on my porch. And every day, she hopes that [...]
Today she gets to decide: push the vacuum up and down, or side to side? How does she want it to turn out? It's entirely up to her. She could even do a mix of both patterns, longways and sideways (if she wants) because she has complete power over the outcome. With every push and [...]
ashley fenker 