February 2023

It is never an easy decision to move a loved one into a care facility. Watching someone lose their ability to live independently can be very difficult. Even when it is clearly the right decision, deciding where the best place for your spouse, family member, etc.. to live is often overwhelming. We are not in […]

6,000,000 Cleaning Ladies AS a child, I was very young. I used to harass ants, stomp on their hills and throw burning sticks in their path. Later I collected insects, gassed them in jars with formaldehyde and pinned them to boards. It’s payback time. These gruesome tales traveled through the ant world and now the

Judy Dykstra-Brown moved to San Juan Cosala in 2001. The Tennessee Writers Alliance National  Poetry Award’s first place winner in 2002, for the past nine years, she has published a minimum of one poem a day on her blog at https://judydykstrabrown.com/Her books include three memoirs, three children’s books and an adult coloring book with humorous

My sister was a twenty-two year-old South African freedom fighter. On July 9th, 1964, in the dead of winter, she and her husband fled Johannesburg on a motorbike. During the height of Apartheid, with Nelson Mandela in prison, Hilary and Ronnie belonged to the African Resistance Movement (ARM) whose aim was not to be terrorists

Time flies by and nothing seems to happen and then suddenly everything seems to happen at once. Mid-December I received a late afternoon call from a friend asking me to be her guest, that same Friday night, at the opening night of It’s a Wonderful Life, A Live Radio Play at Lakeside Little Theatre. I

PART 2 I flew to Caracas and we met with our attorneys. The attorney had little to say. He observed as my bosses informed me of their decision to renege on the commitment. I returned to Maracaibo and a week later the milling division VP flew out and we had dinner. I informed him of

Cleansing: You Are Love During the month of February most of our thoughts turn to Valentine’s Day cards, bouquets of fragrant and colorful flowers, big boxes of chocolates or huge, adorable stuffed animals. Aside from the romantic connotations of February 14th the month of February had different meanings for past civilizations. The name of the

I sit on the tiled floor of my back porch, listening to the mourning doves hoo, hoo, hoo and the other little birds cheep, chirp, and twitter, trying to write something profound about my lime tree. My big, perpetually dusty, labradoodle, a failed foster named Güera (white girl), pushes her irresistibly cute face into mine,

Wildlife Need Their Enemies as Well as Their Friends It was still black dark, early in the morning, the opening day of wild turkey season. I cradled my 20-gauge shotgun and sat there transfixed by the musical gurgle of the current in the stream. From time to time, a breeze would cause the treetops, still

In February romance bloomsAnd Valentine’s becomeThe favored way of making plainThat love has struck you dumb. Heart shaped this and heart shaped thatAre given and received.Chocolate hearts and other fatAre purposely conceived. Postmen pay a price that day,Beneath their groaning load,So urgent messages of loveMay timely be bestowed. You may have heard there’s one small