Former Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer.
Some mornings, you don’t wake up so much as you surface—pulled out of a half-dream, half-memory place where the weight of the past is heavier than the day ahead. Today was one of those mornings. I woke up already sad, already somewhere else, and I let it happen. The playlist was Bear’s Den and Bruce…
Some of the most significant moments in life slip in quietly, like soft footsteps on a worn-out wooden floor — so subtle you hardly notice until they have already rewritten everything you thought you knew. Our story started, as most modern stories do, with a reply on Twitter. Some of the most significant moments in…
There comes a moment in every life—every soul forged in fire, tested by wind, worn down by time and lifted by impossible grace—when you look at the sky and realize the storm isn’t passing over. It’s waiting. Waiting for you to stop standing there like a goddamn monument and move. That’s where I am today.…
Out of nowhere, my former niece Makayla—who, decades ago, for all intents and purposes, had become my unofficially adopted daughter—reached out and asked if I could pick her up. The timing was uncanny. She called while I was out with Amelia, and the moment I learned she needed a ride as soon as possible, I…
I drove like hell through the night, the highway stretching endlessly before me, my headlights cutting through the darkness like a blade. The only sound was the hum of the tires on the asphalt and the music playing on my cell phone. I didn’t stop, didn’t slow down. I just kept driving, pushing forward even…
Day breaks, the lost girl inside wakes, the birds sing, the wind blows through the trees, and the angels sigh. My mornings in Vermont begin early with the rising sun, my days often occupied with my own pursuits of untamed introspection as I try to unravel the mysteries of life, followed by early nightfall to…
My earliest memories are of being a small child sitting on the marble floor of our Greenwich Village apartment. There was something comforting in the coolness of that floor, in its immovability, in its seeming lack of opinion or judgment. It was a respite from the complexities of life in a large city with multiple…