Category: Essay
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The Sun Came Out This Weekend – Again
The Broadway smash hit musical Annie has a special place in my heart. In the summer of 1987, I met my husband while playing the role of Mrs. Greer in a summer stock production of Annie, working backstage also as assistant director/stage manager. We began dating during that production and after twenty-eight years, it’s safe…
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To sleep, perchance to dream . . .
On the morning of September 11, 2001, before all Hell broke loose, I was at my desk working on a lease agreement for a tenant moving into one of the shopping centers managed by the company where I worked. As I worked, writing and editing legal language to insert into the document, I could hear…
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A Salute to Intangible Rewards
On Friday, I was driving my normal route home from school, and as I turned on to this one particular neighborhood street, I slowed down, as usual, on the lookout for the group of boys who sometimes are throwing a football from one yard to another, in some form of ultimate street football, as they…
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B. C. – Before Crying
I am writing this a day early. I normally write and post my weekly essay on Sundays but I am currently on a non-stop flight from Los Angeles to Baltimore and filled with emotion, so Saturday it is. We have been in LA since Wednesday afternoon, my husband and younger daughter. Upon arrival we had…
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Scared Skinnier
Almost a year ago, on May 18, 2015, I visited a new medical practice to have an initial consultation as my internist was in the process of retiring. I asked the mother of one of my students, married to a doctor, for recommendations from him of doctors with offices near the school where I teach.…
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The Elephant in the Room
As my regular readers may know, I have always been a cat person although currently I am the catless owner of an eight-year-old Maltipoo named Puccini. In fact, my very first essay published on Cajun Girl in a Kilt was “License to Carry”, a tongue-in-cheek essay about Puccini’s reluctance to go up and down the…
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Iron-Gray Magnolia
William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” has always intrigued me. When completing course work for my certification in secondary education, this somewhat dark tale of a Southern belle was part of the syllabus for a course on the short story as a type of fiction. Of the thirty short stories covered in that…
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Girl Power
It’s mid-third quarter of this school year and I am knee-deep teaching two novels set in England nearly six hundred years apart. The 7th grade is reading Catherine, Called Birdy by Karen Cushman, the diary of a girl in medieval times during the reign of Edward I, covering the span of one year of her…
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It All Started with a Lemon
We’ve had quite a winter so far, with the evidence of our January blizzard still on display in our yards and parking lots. Today’s unseasonably warm temperatures are supposed to help with that. Just this week, however, on Tuesday we had yet another snow day (our seventh so far) from school due to ice and…
Michelle Blanchard Ardillo 