Her hazel eyes went green like the ocean, and flashed a warning. Keep your composure, she instructed and stood guard next to me.

I’m six years old, pale and thin. A French doctor had prescribed a daily sip of red wine.

From the time that I was five years old, my father, then in his mid-forties, brought me occasionally to “the store” as he called it.

As a little girl, I was fascinated by tales of the old West. I’d sit at my grandparents’ feet for hours, listening.

Memory is a winding road removed from maps. When I was a young girl, it was an old country lane leading to pastureland for our horses

My Baba’s house smelled like borscht and boiled cabbage for holopchi, traditional dishes from the “old country.” Scents that made me cry...

In this childhood, there is nothing more mysterious, wonderful, and ominous than the forest.

On New Year's Eve and Morn from 1970 to 1974, I was never home before dawn.

Of course, we’d never heard of sunblock or sunscreen at the time. Back then it was marketed to grown-ups as suntan oil...

It happened in 1964 when I was twelve years old near the small town of Fort Roseberry in the country now called Zambia

I was nineteen and in Europe when the tenement apartment I’d grown up in burned down.

We open the door to my mother’s car, an Audi 5000, perched precariously on the side of one of Yonkers’ steep hills

We stood outside the dilapidated picket fence and shaded our eyes, casting our gazes across the grassy pasture of old man Buhler’s farmland.

Climbing Jacob's Ladder is a half-forgotten idiom for the ascent to heaven or a path out of adversity.

We didn’t fit in where I grew up. Unlike all our neighbours, my parents were cash poor and worked in manual jobs.

Our home was in a rural area on seven acres of land, one acre of it cleared for our yard.

You’re not in the club anymore,” Jimmy decreed on the first day of fifth grade. Surely, he was joking. He had to be joking.

With my younger sister always vying for our parents’ attention and affection, the walks I took with my father to visit friends and customers

My sister, Nancy, was my first playmate and is my oldest friend. We are the only ones left that remember us as children.

I am running to my father’s side because he has called me.