Browsing articles

Melissa Face

Rain on My Wedding Day

By Melissa Face

Rain on My Wedding Day

I woke up and looked out the window. It was cloudy; but so far, nothing was falling. Conversation from my bridal shower replayed in my head. “It’s bad luck if it rains on your wedding day,” a friend said. “Nonsense,” another guest argued. “A rainy wedding day is good luck.” Good luck or bad, I [...]

Why I Teach

By Melissa Face

Why I Teach

“A 65!” I think to myself. “How could he have gotten a 65 on this assignment?” Perplexed, I flip through the stack of eleventh grade vocabulary quizzes. Then I realize that I graded my answer key. Again. This happens to me at least once a year. What concerns me is that it is starting to [...]

Degrees of Regret

By Melissa Face

Degrees of Regret

“I have something for you,” my dad said, as he walked down the hallway towards his study. “I think you need it more than I do.” He returned with a written record of the last eleven months of my grandmother’s life. My grandmother, Granny, did not keep a diary. Aside from recipes, grocery lists and [...]

A Good Lunch

By Melissa Face

My sister, Amanda, kept me in the loop when I first moved to South Carolina. She mailed me letters regularly and told me about her grades, her high school boyfriend, and how many points she scored in the basketball game. Recently, I found a letter in my attic that wasn’t quite as newsworthy. At least, [...]

No Me in Mommy

By Melissa Face

No Me in Mommy

I didn’t realize how selfish I was until my son was born last year. As it turns out, I really enjoy the luxury of a hot shower each day. I also like being able to drink an entire cup of coffee while it’s still hot. And, every now and then, it’s nice to get more [...]

Walking Side By Side

By Melissa Face

Walking Side By Side

My mom was an English major and an English teacher. So it was only natural for this to be my strongest subject in school and for me to enjoy reading and writing. In high school and college, I received positive comments on my compositions and literary analyses. “You should be an English major,” one professor [...]

Farmer on the Dell

By Melissa Face

Farmer on the Dell

“I’ll call you back in ten minutes,” my mom promised. “I have to go harvest my crops.” Perhaps you are picturing my mother, a woman in her late fifties, atop an International tractor, plowing a field. She is wearing a plaid shirt and a straw hat. Beads of sweat form on her forehead as she [...]

Fashionably Challenged

By Melissa Face

Fashionably Challenged

I am on my couch in my favorite clothing: a gray, retro, Mickey Mouse t-shirt and turquoise and pink striped pajama pants. If it were socially acceptable to teach high school students in this outfit, it would become my uniform. I would change things up from time to time (switch to my red puppy dog [...]

Green Mountain State of Mind

I committed the southern girl’s ultimate sin. In fact, I probably couldn’t have done anything worse. I married a Yankee. I grew up in rural, southern Virginia. I spent Sunday afternoons on my grandparents’ farm riding bikes, making mud pies and collecting acorns. I shelled butter beans, snapped green beans and shucked corn. I embraced [...]

A New Kind of Organized

By Melissa Face

a-new-kind-of-organized

It is three o’clock in the morning, and I am watching an infomercial for some sort of robotic vacuum cleaner. I am tempted to order it in hopes that it will suck up the cookie crumbs in the kitchen and the mound of partially chewed dog food in the hallway. Perhaps it could restore my [...]

 Page 1 of 3  1  2  3 »

Our Affiliate Publications and Services