“For thirty years my mother pretended she was moving. My mother survived things she hated by pretending she was leaving.”    Faith Shearin ********** It happens every new year, this urge to purge, to rid myself of the superfluity of living and get down to the real meat and potatoes of life. Forget the garage cleanout. …

What is truth, you ask? Where is it to be found? One place knoweth your secret sins: The bathroom scales. ********** They lie there, silent as death, watching you approach, trembling with trepidation. You know the verdict: Guilty. You want to avoid them, to sluff off the error of your ways. You hate its brutal …

Occasionally something magical can happen to us, something so unexpected it might be called an epiphany, and we are changed forever. ********** January 6th is Epiphany Sunday. It finds me sitting in a padded pew in the village Methodist Church, celebrating the wind-up of the twelfth day pf Christmas. Christians remember Epiphany Sunday as the …

And so is 2018. At least much of it. The dangling details of yesteryear are like the uneaten leftovers that linger in our refrigerator. They loiter like holiday hangovers and attest to our experimentation with epicurean indulgence. Inside is an array of what appears to be small, dish-like spaceships and other galactic debris, all wrapped …