Memsy Price

The labels of the letters E, A and S have worn from the keys of my computer. The L is barely sticking around. The wear serves as a physical reminder of the hours I spend each day behind a keyboard or touchscreen, tapping and swiping. But it wasn’t always this way. I learned print letters […]

Amid the holiday madness that inevitably comes like Christmas cards in the mail, it can be easy to forget to slow down. Remembering to take a deep breath can be harder still. That’s how and why my daughter Kate and I found ourselves in a yoga class during packed days of post-Thanksgiving travel, school assignments, […]

Someone dumped two mixed black lab puppies in the alley behind our house. They created a makeshift pen by wedging two rolling trash bins against our fence, keeping the pups contained until we heard the yelps. That was almost 13 years ago. We found a loving home for the female puppy, now named Flynn. But […]

My daughter and her friend spent the better part of a recent winter afternoon assembling and painting two wooden birdhouses. We hung ours midway up the trunk of a maple tree by our front patio. Then, of course, we waited and hoped. During the past two summers, families of wrens have nested in our carport. […]

My Italian grandfather broke with the Catholic Church when he came to Durham. For someone born and raised in the Campania region, home to San Gennaro and Padre Pio, his secession from the church was especially complicated. It came about for many reasons, some real and some imagined, but he still displayed a tiny bust […]

As I watched the coverage of Hurricane Sandy bearing down on the Northeast early this week, reports of New Yorkers hunkering down made me nostalgic for the grit and determination that I found in the city as a young adult. Six days after my graduation in Chapel Hill, I sped up Interstate 95 with my […]

According to news reports, three of the four boys who verbally abused their school bus monitor, Karen Klein, in a suburb of Rochester have apologized for their actions. All four have been suspended from school for a year. That was too late, though, to stop the boy who videoed the taunting and posted it to […]

As instructed, we had shown up at the fairgrounds in Rocky Mount, arriving just before sunset and wearing makeshift rain gear built of garbage bags. “Don’t worry,” one of the guys from the U.S. Department of Agriculture assured us, “they’ll be here.” As the sun began to set, we saw just a few blackbirds, flying […]