Birdie Jaworski

Hurricane Dean is thrashing Jamaica. Courageous firefighters lost their life in a raging blaze near Ground Zero. The news is full of scary events, full of murder and mayhem and politicians pounding their chests. But life goes on, surprises us, delights us, hands us moments mundane, precious, even in the midst of the most unsettling news.  Read more >

A young man I know fell off an outcropping of granite this summer, fell eight vertical feet, fell into a six-week land of cast and crutch and exotic metal pins. Shattered tibia. Surgery. June plans as broken, as painful as his swollen skin. I wanted to sign his cast, the blue sheath that hid the parallel scars, but he refused my pen. "I don't want any signatures. I just want everyone to leave me alone."  Read more >

Vivian Vance and her sister owned the house I call my own. They lived in this simple cracked-stucco box on the edge of the Great Plains, where Mother Earth New Mexico gives birth to a flat-chested Oklahoman girl, a long-legged Texas boy. When Vivian as Ethel Mertz told Lucy Ricardo that she grew up in the Land of Enchantment, she wasn't kidding. I imagine her tooling along the Turquoise Trail outside of Santa Fe in a silver-finned convertible while her handkerchief-covered curls catch white sage and sharp bits of tumbleweed. On purpose, of course. Vivian was that kind of gal.  Read more >

Weather extremes. Drought. Rain without end. It seems like more and more folks are noticing strange days, noticing weather that seems two steps left, off, unpredictable, new. My own town knows the capriciousness of Mother Nature. Last year we suffered the end of a five-year drought. This year the rains come every day, leaving my street with a greet patina I don't recognize. Scientists, pundits, and politicians are posting conflicting reflections, reports, opinions on climate change across the internet, but we "regular folk" have something that somehow seems more important: the evidence our eyes, our hands provide us.  Read more >

Ninth grade bored the hell outta me until Mr. Adamski caught me carving my wooden desk with a dull Girl Scout penknife, caught me marking territory with a tool as deliberate as a male bulldog’s piss. I rubbed soft graphite into the cat scratch arroyo until it shone dull black ache. BJ loves DF I carved a heart, an arrow, an impossibility. Dean loved cheerleader Cindy with the feathered hair, didn’t notice me and the tarnished saxophone I hauled to school. “Ms. Jaworski.” He blew out the Ms. on a long exhale with an accent just west of Boston. My New England town grew teachers like him, second-generation Polish with a deep respect of education. He must have been twenty-eight years old, twenty-nine. His hair hung in oily ringlets around the collar of his Nehru jacket, and he wore tight striped pants over dirty Earth shoes. I stared at those shoes, at the brown crepe soles, didn’t meet his eyes.  Read more >