Author: Jeannine Ouellette

  • Apathy vs. Action

    America-bashing is so in vogue. Teenagers, especially, are vulnerable to this general sense of “how bad we are,” based on a couple of tragic elections and a war of lies. I’m brokenhearted over these things, too, but the “how bad we are” mantra grows wearisome when it comes from what is, according to a recent…

  • Wear, Tear, Repair

    The doctor stared over her glasses and leaned closer. She caressed the stumps where Blueberry’s arm and leg had once been. This grandmotherly surgeon, Clare Erickson, might be our region’s most prominent dollologist, and at this moment she was clearly weighing Blueberry’s prospects. “Do you know what a morgue is?” she said to Lillie. Lillie…

  • Paradise Reconsidered

    Even Jon, who sees everything, wasn’t expecting to see the drowned man rolling in the waves. We were sweetly exhausted from sun and saltwater on the first day of our vacation when Jon took me by the elbow. “Look there,” he said. “Is that a person?” Jon’s uncanny tendency to see everything used to stun…

  • The Last Resort

    Real-life emergency rooms are nothing like television. For one thing, there’s the pace. If you filmed a one-hour real-time show in an actual emergency room, the scene might never change. Last month, while I was finally leaving the ER with a freshly diagnosed “honkin’ kidney infection on its way to the bloodstream,” I heard the…

  • Better Off Without Him?

    My dear friend Julie wants to marry Louis, our nearly house-trained Yorkie-Poo puppy. A lot of people might think it’s offbeat and even disturbing that Julie imagines matrimony with a small, furry dog, who, charming though he may be, has certain disgusting habits, like snacking on my nephew’s dirty diapers. Mostly, I’m used to the…

  • Believe It or Not

    Back in the seventies, when I was tender and impressionable, my mom used to chat with her houseplants. “It helps them grow,” she’d explain to me as I followed her around from one beaded macramé hanger to the next. “They don’t understand the words, but they can tell you’re talking to them. They like the…