My Beauty Uniform is a stretched-out sweater, pilling everywhere, light brown to highlight my fine-tresses. My Beauty Uniform is capturing your joy, the way your smile starts slow, slow enough that only I know you might flash a grin that makes people who think they know you take a closer look. My Beauty Uniform is […]
Category: Parenting
A New Fixed Place
A New Fixed Place by Nancy Schatz Alton I still see you in your broad striped onesie, blue & minty green watch you roll across the wood floor: you propel yourself where you want to go. I read that I was your fixed place. Slowly, I am no-longer-your-fixed place. You are becoming your own […]
The Songs That Make Us
The Songs That Make Us by Nancy Schatz Alton When I play Romeo & Juliet on the piano I’m transported back to high school how I played out my grief again & again (slowly, far from well) as my mother listened. When I got stuck (often) she called out, keep going! She knew I played […]
Everything changes too fast.
Everything changes too fast. By Nancy Schatz Alton A friend asks me, ‘What’s it like to paddle board in the fog?’ She doesn’t know that my husband and I put the paddle board away in its winter home last night, atop the fishing boat. He might take the boat out again before spring. I might […]
Making a Path
Making a Path by Nancy Schatz Alton We are whacking our way through a forest, untamed. Underneath the understory there’s a million stories: Everyone who came before us making a path of every mistake and misstep broken trust and dried out bones wheels falling off the tracks ruts underneath the understory. We make our own […]
The Letting Go
The Letting Go by Nancy Schatz Alton This morning she drove away in the dark, headlights off. Forgotten headlights lighting up my worry. The monster comes roaring back: The one I left behind after her first year. Her neck will snap! The other driver won’t see her! Will they find my contact on the […]
The Battle
The Battle by Nancy Schatz Alton I am so full of light and dark and I do battle every day. I make a collage out of my world and pray the lightness wins. Lately I have dark, dark, dreams. But last night the end of my dreaming had a spark of light. I was watching […]
Making Pizza Dough
I make time to make dinner for my family even though I’ll be at work when they eat it. It’s the opposite of making them do things for themselves. It’s the ultimate in taking care of someone else even as anyone can argue that my family should take care of themselves. But this making dinner […]
What I’ve been up to since graduation.
What I’ve been up to since graduation is making a life. By Nancy Schatz Alton I want so much more than that: For the crowd to cheer when I wander up to the microphone. To have learned how to wow the crowd with my words and intonation. To not care so much that I make […]
A Sum That Led Me Here
A Sum That Led Me Here by Nancy Schatz Alton My center spills into this day; I catch its edges with classical music. The notes promise epiphany; a recycling bin rolls down the drive. I know how long it takes to learn a melody, one line at a time. My brother writes, Remember the thunderstorm […]