Kiss my List » Storytelling

This piece was originally published almost four years ago, in December 2014. It’s once again the season for traditions, memory holders, and that purple bin that I just lugged up from the baseme...

https://www.kissmylist.com/memory-holders/

The views from the hill where Matthias Church sits are incredible. On the Buda side of Budapest, tourists flock to the photo ops to get shots much better composed than mine. When my family and I ...

https://www.kissmylist.com/chinese-pre-wedding-photos/

Leave. It’s almost autumn, although the leaves on the trees in my yard haven’t started to turn. Soon I will walk the dogs through piles of them, crunching as we go. There is a satisfying soun...

https://www.kissmylist.com/if-you-leave-me-now/

In January, this was Bear. He and his brother were three months old, rescued from a kill shelter. We took them in for almost three weeks, introducing them to a warm home with people who treat dog...

https://www.kissmylist.com/brown-bear/

Thirty-four years after he died, my grandfather’s two children meet each other for the first time.   His daughter is my mother, to whom I gave a subscription to Ancestry.com last December, ...

https://www.kissmylist.com/long-lost-sibling-now-found/

I occasionally reminisce about the time before kids, only to find it’s tough to remember. How did we spend the weekday evenings before they were filled with crying babies, demanding toddlers, ...

https://www.kissmylist.com/dinner/

I had never smoked a cigarette or a cigar, but on New Year’s Eve 1997, everyone else was doing it. We were celebrating with the gusto of the twenty-somethings we were, new enough to legal drink...

https://www.kissmylist.com/secret/

Almost half a century ago, a man and a woman fell in love and were married. They danced to For Once in My Life by Stevie Wonder at their wedding. For once in my life I won’t let sorrow hurt m...

https://www.kissmylist.com/story-of-her-life/

I am five or six years old, and I want my ears pierced. My mother takes me to a family friend who is a pediatrician, and he numbs my tender lobes with ice. One needle poke sends me screaming out...

https://www.kissmylist.com/when-i-am-brave/

I inherited my first Christmas cactus from my grandmother, and it never had a blossom. I didn’t even know the green plant was supposed to bloom around the holidays. I’m sure if my grandmothe...

https://www.kissmylist.com/blossom/