‘Butter and love, baby’
If you are lucky, you will wake up some morning and smell a doughy, cinnamon concoction drifting up the stairs. The smell will slip under your blankets, tickle your chest, [...]
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Posted August 31, 2022in Joe's Neighborhood
Posted August 03, 2022in Joe's Neighborhood
The end of a time
The farmhouse sat on one side of the gravel road, surrounded by a large yard with a pump, a vegetable garden and scattered peony bushes. Chickens worked the ground in [...]
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Posted July 06, 2022in Joe's Neighborhood
A barber’s life in 3 yellow pages
“I actually thought I’d die with the shears in my hands.” The old man stands behind his barber chair — his podium for an audience of one. He looks at [...]
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Posted June 01, 2022in Joe's Neighborhood
In the gutter in Dublin
The rain is gentle in Dublin, Ireland, unlike the hard rain in Iowa this spring. The rain washes down the old slate roofs, flowing into gutters and spilling into private [...]
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Posted May 04, 2022in Joe's Neighborhood
Happy ‘Windsday’
The mud-brown leaves, pressed flat and brittle by winter snow, swirl around on my blue tarp looking for a way to escape the mulch pile. A gust blows from the [...]
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Posted April 06, 2022in Joe's Neighborhood
Stuck in Bad Luck Canyon
Sometimes it seems like the only thing you can win is the short end of the stick. Why is that? Did you break a mirror, walk under a ladder, step [...]
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Posted March 02, 2022in Joe's Neighborhood
Who should be culled from the herd?
“The test is in the pneumatic tube,” the pharmacy tech’s crackly robotic voice says over the speaker. Great. But which pneumatic tube? With all the other tubes and pipes and [...]
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Posted February 02, 2022in Joe's Neighborhood
The rosary
The two young girls shared nearly everything. No surprise. The Great Depression guaranteed a certain equality even though the girls were four years apart in age. “So you shared your [...]
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Posted January 05, 2022in Joe's Neighborhood
‘Begone, Satan!’ or ‘Come hither, Iowa Angels’?
It began when she was 14 years old. Secret voices. Shameful desires. Unholy thoughts of suicide and mayhem. This went on for 26 years until she had enough of the [...]
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Posted December 01, 2021in Joe's Neighborhood
Winter is coming
And Sister Marla Smith’s eyes light up. Trust me. Holding her thin hand and rubbing her thin back, I sit quietly beside her wheelchair. She smiles, and I swear a [...]
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