My mom died last year, and it is the strangest thing to not be able to pick up the phone and call her. You don’t realize how much you take for granted; I miss the sound of her voice. I am a completely different person since her passing, and I recently had an epiphany: there…
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I’ve always been looking for Mayberry.” When asked why, she responded, “I pretty much grew up in the ghetto. My mom was single, and our budget afforded us a small apartment in a crappy area. While I couldn’t change the family I was born into, I always wished I came from a ‘normal’ family, the…
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The adverb, just, is a powerfully diminishing word. Think, “I am just a ____.” The word stretches back to the 1400s, meaning, “exactly, precisely, punctually,” and morphed to mean “merely, barely” in the 1660s. When someone listens to the wrong voice, using ‘just’ to modify his or her identity, it reverberates in the mind, and…
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