Author: ruhlwrite

Marion Duckworth Smith stood shivering in the central hallway holding a candle. Its flickering flames kindled her heart. “I knew that the house had been waiting for me,” she says. “And I said to myself, ‘I’m going to bring it back to life, and it will bring me back to life.'” It was on that cold November night in 1979 that her romance with the house and with the man who owned it began. It was her second date with Michael M. Smith, and he had asked her whether she…

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SCRE-E-E-C-H! “Oh, no, I think I need new brake pads,” Clark Gookin says in mock horror. He doesn’t mean it to be funny, but it is. He pulls off his white plastic rock-climbing helmet, the one that makes his head look like Humpty Dumpty, and straps it to the handlebars of his bicycle. Clark is long and lean like a telephone line, so he’s not an easy fit for this tyke of a bike that’s the color of a ripe Georgia peach. Clark always goes for the guffaws. Actually, it’s…

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“I can sum up my life in one sentence,” declares Maki Hirose. “I’m a young, straight, very available guy.” “Very” is the key word, he emphasizes. Maki’s a photographer, and he’s shy when he’s not behind the shutter, so his straightforward, single-minded Match.com-like description leaves out a lot of things that need to be included for the sake of total accuracy and complete honesty. Let’s start our Maki snapshot with sweet and funny…

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I saw it under the light of the streetlamp outside my house. Something — or someone — was staring at me. As I walked to the front gate, I realized that it wasn’t one face but four that were peering out at me. One was smiling, one was frowning, one was mouthing off, and one was gleefully sticking out its tongue. Like many of the houses in my neighborhood, mine has a wall out front. When I moved in, the wall was falling down, raining bricks on the sidewalk as people passed by. I tore…

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There’s a padlock on the majestic wrought-iron gate that guards the dead at Lawrence Cemetery. The plot’s red-brick wall is reinforced by a ring of shiny silver chain link that’s crowned by barbed wire. Nobody can get in — and no bodies can get out — unless James M. Sheehan lets them. James is God’s gardener. He has been keeping the cemetery alive for, well, it’s going on 55 years now. Before he pulls open the gate, he stops to brush away the vines growing…

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