On the first day of the year, she was running late to the party. She had wanted to walk because the weather was beautiful, but that would take too long. So she rented a bike, one of the newer models that used electricity to increase its speed. An ideal vehicle for someone pressed for time.…

She has been in line for a little over an hour. She is practicing four part breathing to stay calm. Her car rental reservation was for 44 minutes ago. As her belly balloons out and in, she shuffles forward a few steps as another person leaves the queue. Still a dozen people ahead of her…

His shovel scrapes against the frozen concrete on the driveway. He makes a zigzag pattern in the snow, moving the accumulation to the edge and then scooping and tossing it into a mound. No one else is out shoveling and with good reason—it is still snowing. And just as soon as he clears a section,…

When the snow finally stopped pouring from the sky, it continued to move about horizontally now and then with the wind gusts. Besides an occasional howl, all was quiet, the way it always is after a hard snow collapses the outside world’s activities. I took this opportunity to look out the window. I could differentiate…

Of course, no one wanted it to be a complete disaster. But when a series of fire trucks pulled up with their lights flashing in front of the house on the corner, more than one neighbor peeking out of kitchen curtains entertained, for the briefest of moments, an image of the house lying in a…

She ordered a cup of coffee and a breakfast sandwich from the fast food kiosk near her gate in the terminal. Giving her name to the cashier in a loud pleasant lilt, almost singing, she caused the other bleary passengers to look up from their phones. Positivity had become a rare sighting at the airport.…

After so many years alone, she hated knowing there were people who now lived upstairs. She hated the way these people made the ceiling creak and their Amazon packages that littered the tiny vestibule. She hated people who were not family. People who did not understand what she was saying when she yelled curses at…