My Jesus is the image taken from the Shroud of Turin. He is a dark-skinned, bearded Jew with a magnificent schnoz. He is not that northern European guy we all grew up with. The haloed, angelic, light-skinned, goldilocks with his blue eyes rolled toward heaven. In fact, I imagine him to be more like Chez …
Monthly Archives: February 2019
NO MORE APOLOGIES
What they don’t tell you in teacher’s college or EDU grad programs is that you will spend the rest of your career apologizing for everything that comes out of your mouth. I suppose there are some teachers out there who have never had to apologize for making a decent living, for their education, the …
STARDUST 1958
I might not be able to tell you what I had for dinner a few days ago, and I might not remember your name, but I sure as heck can dig up the most obscure details about your family history and my own. My memory has always been funny that way. I’ve never been …
REFLECTING THE LAKE
Donna Dufresne The lake glistens in the dark, reflecting the red beacon that guards Weir Hill from airplanes. There are small yellow lights from all the houses that have popped up like unwanted puffballs in what was once a wild and lonely shore, and that rose colored wash in the sky never grows dark …
THAT FELLER’S AWFUL OLD
Mr. Beaty is back! His shack at the end of our road has been forlorn all summer in its emptiness. The grass has grown tall around his rusty old Ford Gremlin, and the cats have scattered to the barn across the street. In June, he called Andrea Cunningham to say that he’d lost …
WHEN THE APPLE FALLS FROM THE TREE OF RACISM
I’ve never been one for the Old Testament. The stories creeped me out as a child and filled my head with the images of murderous brothers, frightful storms and zombie-like lepers roaming the desert. The feminist side of me certainly had issues with the story of Adam and Eve and those literalists who believe that …
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BIRTH MARKED
Donna Dufresne A few years back, my ninety-one-year-old father made one of those odd confessions that come with old age when the brain wanders around in the tangled past, grasping at threads. I had just told him that I had sent in my DNA test to find out about our heritage. I joked that …
Los Niños de la Corizon
Donna Dufresne We were curled up on the leather couch in front of the fire at Grampy Bates’ ranch. I’d brought the hatbox I found in Mama’s old closet that afternoon, and we were rummaging through old photographs, letters and other memorabilia I hadn’t seen before. On top of the pile there was a …
THE TANGO DRESS
Donna Dufresne I sat there lost in thought, admiring the fancy dress and shoes my mother, or someone else had sketched in her journal, when I heard my sister Dodie’s BMW kick up the gravel of the circular drive out front of the house. It screeched to a hissing halt of dust, and I was …
GYPSIES AND THE ART OF BEING AN OUTSIDER
Donna Dufresne I have had a life-long obsession with the Romani people (Roma), commonly known as “Gypsies”. It may have started in my childhood, when my mother told me stories about how the Gypsies would come into town every summer when she was a child and set up camp down by the Charles River. There …
OUTSIDE THE BOX
Donna Dufresne I have spent my lifetime feeling left out – too dark, to white, not Indian enough, not smart enough for the liberal intelligentsia, too smart for my family, working class by birth and therefore severely lacking in a sense of entitlement to carry me through life. And there is no place on earth …
Call of Duty
Call of Duty Teaching has got to be the most iconic of American professions. Other than the anachronistic Irish Cop walking a beat in New York City, there’s probably no other career less understood or underestimated in popular culture. Just like film noir or Law and Order enthusiasts, who might think they know what …
Wormwood Hill on a Fine Spring Day
My first encounter with Wormwood Hill was on a brilliant spring day in 1981. I immediately fell in love with the rolling green hills of that rocky farm which was laced with stonewalls. The barn listed a little too heavily toward the road and the hay spilled out like water through the cracks of a …
WELCOME TO OUT OF THE BOX MUSINGS! Donna Dufresne
Donna Dufresne Dear Readers, Thank you so much for visiting my little “She-Shed”, where I crunch out reams of written word. I finally got around to starting a blog, thanks to my more technically savvy husband. After years of dropping guerilla essays, poetry, songs and fiction onto my Facebook page, or worse, sending op-eds …
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