I remember when I was younger, my family lived in this little grey cottage on a 50-acre estate in Dover Massachusetts. At the time, my parents were scarcely older than I am now, and didn’t have much money, so they worked as caretakers on the estate to subsidize rent. My sister and I, we saw this place as a never ending fantasy land: fields of buttercups, forests...

I told this story last Thursday at a Mass Mouth Story Slam. I won second place and went on to compete in the semi-finals. After winning there too, I’m now performing this at the Big Mouth Off on April 17th at the Coolidge Corner Theater. Join me! In 2010 I went to Bali Indonesian to volunteer for a birthing clinic, and from the second I stepped off the plane, I...

“What you need to do is defy any obvious logic,” my dad says to my moms husband on Christmas morning. They’re discussing the password for Tom’s new email account, but they’re talking on opposite sites of the universe. You see, my dad is an IT specialist and Tom still uses a Charter.net email address, whatever that is. It’s a real...

By the end of the walk, my mom’s overly abused shoes fought back: she had a giant blister on the back of her heel. Eventually, she had to take them off and finish the walk barefoot (her preferred shoe anyway).  “Ahhh, much better,” she sighed, looking up into the clear sky and breathing in the fresh morning air. She looked comfortable finally. At...

As mom and I walked up the endless, steep hill the conversation led to hers and my dad’s death. This isn’t something we’ve talked about a lot, and I was surprised about how candid she was about it.  Apparently, they’ve made all kinds of “arrangements” without my sister and I knowing they were thinking about their own demise. For...