Penny for Her Thoughts: Customer associations, with love

By Penelope Griffiths

As I said in my March 4th column, I work for a well-known drug store chain. I have been working as a customer associate now for almost nine months, long enough to have had a baby (which I haven’t, but one of my colleagues had twins!) and long enough to have “regulars” I know by name and date of birth (an ID is needed for purchasing tobacco and/or alcohol).

The Loneliest Liberal:Complicating her story

By James Knudsen

Spring has truly arrived: I have started cleaning my house. Note the use of the word “started.” I have indeed begun the process, but just as building high-speed rail through the middle of California is a “pro-cess,” so it is with getting my home into a condition that the authorities would consider fit for human habitation.

Roger’s Reality – The Jasper Chronicles: The Gas Station

By Roger Owens

My uncle Guy’s gas station sat just east of my Aunt Sue’s house, by the turn onto what is now known as North East 38th Street. But I much prefer the moniker it had back in the 1960s: “Buzzard Bay Road.” The station was just west of where Buzzard Bay met County Route 6, the main east-west highway, or what passed for one at the time, into Jasper, Florida. If you took Route 6 past the station and the house, you would arrive in Jasper proper in a few minutes; if you went Buzzard Bay way, you would meet up with County Route 51 north of town. The station sat on the north side of Route 6 facing a bit southeast, and across the road was a corn field that, to the eye of a child at least, appeared to begin at the barbed wire fence and form an impenetrable wall that just kept on going. Out the back was another just like it, but it contained some trees in the distance, which seemed to give a bit of perspective, and to suggest that these fields did not, indeed, continue unto the ends of the Earth.

Poetry & Portraits: Look

Drawing by Susan C. Price

Look
By Eric Meub

[Originally published on November 9, 2013]

The altercation takes her by surprise:
same boy, same busy street, same tug-of-war
about authority. Today her eyes,
all by themselves it seems, have shut a door.

Adventures from Bulgaria: Summer in the Mountains – Days 14 - 16

Detail from 18th photo

Destiny’s lessons in disguise

By Valeria Idakieva

[Sequel to “Days 12 & 13,” published on December 24, 2018.]

When I woke up on the morning of the 14th day of my trek along the E8 European long-distance path, I felt happy because I remembered going to bed the day before and praying to the God of the E8 path to remove the pain in my kidneys and let me complete the trek, and now I felt only a slight pain.