Averil Dean's Blog, page 6

Eight to Five

This week I had to write a job description for my boss:

Patient Care Coordinator (aka Receptionist)

Schedule patient appointments.Answer phones, take and distribute messages, greet and check in patients, manage emailed communications with patients. Manage requested schedule changes for existing patients, updating wait-list spreadsheet to document patients’ availability and expedite flow of new patient appointments. Send welcome letters to patients at the start of therapy to reinforce polic...

Comma

What do you do with your stories? I’m not talking about novels, constructed stories, the kind we create from whole cloth and bring to life on the page. I’m thinking of the stories that serve as placeholders in our lives, the icons of memory which survive the passage of years with their outlines intact, colors still as vivid as the day they were made. The ones that stand out. Sometimes the reasons for their longevity are obvious—there could be some trauma attached, or spiritual elevation, like th...

Flower/Girl

Twenty things I did today, in no particular order:

Fed my dogs, Oliver and Henry. This guy down the street saw me out with them the other day and offered me half a bag of dog food he said was leftover. Leftover. Yikes. This reminded me of Hemingway’s six-word story: For sale: Baby shoes. Never worn.Zipped up my black boots.Sucked on a lemon drop, leftover from a Secret Santa gift bag. Took a call at work from a lady who had the wrong number. She was trying to reach her daughter, and kept aski...

Flash Fiction

Late draft, flash fiction. February 21, 2021.

Sound by Blastwave FX

Paper Dolls

Yesterday I received a new cover for my travelers notebooks. The cover is handmade of golden leather, and closes with a strong elastic band on which I hung a turquoise pendant. Inside is a bundle of notebooks on dot grid paper, with covers I decoupaged using the pages of a beautiful book about plants. One of the notebooks is my journal, another is for drafts, and the third is a commonplace book for when I want to make notes on something I’m reading, or record an eavesdropped conversation or joke...

January 6

In the late afternoon,the beginning of darkness, finally aloneafter doing some outlandish thing—fucking an old friend, for instance,or marching on authority with ambiguous intent,and feeling yourselfat one with the pack, howling, hurling yourself at windows,falling through the chimneyand into the third pig's stew—evening shuts the door and covers the debris,and you trudge back to your pickup truck or bus,lower to the ground than transport ought to be,arriving home to find the arm...

Bareback

The day before yesterday, I got my second COVID shot. This one hit a little harder than the first, so after struggling though a few hours at work, I drove home and put on a pair of pajamas, laid a heating pad in the bed and crawled on top. Rarely have I stalled out this way. My body seemed pressed by a heavy weight, flattened to the bed, while my mind remained in a curious state during which the act of moving seemed quaint, as if walking across the room were an activity from a bygone era. At the...

Last Gleaming

Happy birthday, America.

I have to say, the mood is less than celebratory this year. We have upwards of 50,000 new cases of COVID-19 every day, and we’ve lost more than 130,000 mothers and fathers, sisters, brothers, and children. There is no end in sight, since the President’s ego and cowardice are running the show. With his usual stunning gift for irony, he’s also trying one more time to dismantle Obama’s healthcare plan; apparently mid-pandemic, when millions of people are out of work thr...

Gift Horse

Photo by Suzy Hazelwood on Pexels.com

I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to be white in America. For me, personally; your mileage may vary. I’m a suburban hetero mother of three, no religious affiliation, no particular attachment to geography. I don’t know where my family hails from. In school, I was taught about the history of people who look like me, so I assume many of my ancestors were European. I’ve lived and worked with people of many ethnicities, of course, but most of them h...

Look

Photo by Jumana Dakkur on Pexels.com

This week has been rough. The world is hurting in so many ways. I’ve spent this time making the head space to take on a burden my neighbors have been carrying for far too long on their own. I’ve been trying to listen and learn while this conversation about race, police brutality, white privilege, and repeated trauma has been going on around the world. And can I tell you, I have a shit-ton of learning to do.

We all have our faults. One of mine is the te...