I drove out to New Town Square today to visit my great-aunt Anne. This is not the first time I’ve written about visiting her, as it is always a bittersweet experience. When I view my time with her from one angle, I can recognize what a lovely and fortunate thing is it that […]

On Homelessness
by Leana McClellan
She is only five,
my child who stands rooted
watching the homeless man pace.
He shakes fists at the sky
howls curses that jolt her
though she doesn’t understand the words.
His clothes are torn to fringe
like a performer in a lunatic rodeo.
A mini voyeur in Cabbage Patch sweats
she looks for him everyday on our vacation.
He eats, arranges […]

Last week I wrote about the CVS at the corner of 19th and Chestnut and how I always imagined that that intersection would be the set for the play of my life. Here’s another piece of the story of why I am attached to that spot.
During my childhood, my mom would bring my sister and […]

Five years ago today, my grandmother died. She was 86 years old and ready to go. She had lived through the deaths of her father, mother, one child, the aunt who raised her, a husband, a brother, a sister, multiple friends, assorted aunts/uncles/cousins and another husband. She was tired. But it […]

When I first moved to Philadelphia I didn’t have a car. I didn’t know many people. I worked 13 blocks down the street from where I lived. My world was small in those days, both in the physical distance I traveled regularly and in the mental space I devoted to it.
Part […]

I went out after class tonight with some of my classmates, drank 3/4 of a beer and now feel intensely, immensely exhausted. It’s in part because we workshopped a piece of mine in class tonight. No matter how relaxed I try to make myself, I always am unnervingly tense when people start talking […]

Sitting on the trolley today, I watched a woman french braid her hair all by herself and was instantly taken back to my 11th grade chemistry class.  My lab partner in that class was a young woman with era-appropriate name of Tiffany.  We first met in the 5th grade and spent most of middle and […]

I am alive, but just barely.  Other than a few brief trips to the kitchen and bathroom, I spent the day in bed.  My cousin Angie called me from the front door late this afternoon, when I didn’t hear the bell ring, to say that she had left a container of soup.  By the time […]

When my mom was a little girl, she would play outside in the winter until her cheeks were numb and her fingers ached inside her gloves. She would come back into the house, weeping from the pins and needles that ran through her fingers. Elizabeth, the maid/babysitter who worked for my mom’s family for […]

As most people who read this blog know, the apartment I live in belonged to my grandparents long before I was born. I first came here when I was just three months old and came to visit at least once a year until 2002, when I moved in for good. You’d think after […]