Odometers turn like the years of our lives.

Cincinnati’s Findlay Market resembled normal during the pandemic. It’s Spring of 2021. Standing in the biergarten of Findlay Market, one of the country’s oldest operating public markets, my eyes fall on the square sail cloths strung from poles. Right now, they act as masks, hindering the longed-for sunshine. There are…

12 Lessons from a Year inside My Head — In the midst of the pandemic, whenever my husband and I argued, I called our disagreements quarantine quarrels. Light-hearted or heavy-handed descriptions of them populated my journal kept over the past year. Twelve months later, re-reading those entries, I discovered the disputes were, thankfully, less about my husband, and more…

A Tribute to Michael Stanley — In the early ’80s, when my girlfriends and I were old enough to drive, we flipped a coin over whose parent’s car we would borrow, scraped up enough quarters to make the gas tank gurgle, and drove into downtown Cleveland. Downtown was a frequent destination for us. …

Taft Museum “Walk this Way” exhibit a reminder of a grandmother whose work went largely unrecognized. — Droplets rained down on my front stoop. I couldn’t decide what shoes to wear for the mile trek to the Taft Museum Footwear in Step with Labor Activism, Suffrage, and the Sexual Revolution exhibit. What shoes to wear: the prevailing question for women, for bad weather and for someone raised…

A former food and arts editor, collage artist, and soulful friend, Sara knew how to draw out the light. — In 2017, in the middle of a hushed January night, my husband dropped me off in a parking lot behind the Mariemont Theatre. I boarded a bus teaming with mostly women, bound for D.C., and in dramatic fashion, rose up the rubber tread stairs, nerves hopping out of my skin. …

We can bridge the divide by upholding the right to vote. — (* Originally published in Cincinnati Enquirer: 11/23/2020) The man instinctively took a seat behind the plastic divider as I discussed his voter record over the phone with someone working the Board of Elections (BOE) help desk. …

On a Sunday morning, craving a hike in Appalachia. — With street names like Bacon Flat, Tater Ridge and Plum Run, I’ve come to think of Chalet Nivale Nature Reserve as a comfort hike. And on this Sunday morning following the time change, it’s what I crave. Nestled between dolomite cliffs and a few rural traditional homes, the turnoff for…

Fever, not from COVID, but from hope. In Norwood, I sit amidst the yawn of morning, in my bronze Venza, a car as old as my memories. The lot where I’m parked is empty. An asphalt desert engulfs me. …