Showing results by narrator "Kathleen Bond" in All Categories

Identical twins Goldie Silver, an over-the-hill flower child from Juneau, Alaska and her identical twin Godiva Olivia DuBois, a wealthy widow who writes a syndicated advice to lovelorn column from her Beverly Hills estate, don't go looking for trouble—it finds them.

As parents today, we often feel that our role is to protect our children from the world: to cushion them when they fall, to lift them over obstacles, and to remove sharp rocks from their path. But controlling a child’s entire environment and keeping all pain at bay isn’t feasible—we can’t prepare the world for our children, so instead we should focus on preparing our children for the world.

March 4,  1918. An army cook at Fort Riley, Kansas reported to the infirmary with a temperature of 103.1 degrees fahrenheit. Within two days, another 521 men became sick. It is one of the first recorded outbreaks of what came to be known as the Spanish flu. Living in the country, we fared better than those who lived in crowded conditions in the big cities. We were like one big, happy family, living in different houses. We held barn raisings, outdoor festivals, and church picnics. But at last, the plague of 1918 found us too, and that silent killer was about to drag us into hell.

Before the advent of social media, which has been a powerful tool for amplifying the voices of women, the experience of sexual harassment and abuse was both insidious and isolating. Egregious workplace behavior toward women was tolerated with the unspoken acceptance that "men will be men" and complaints about sexual assault in and outside the office often ended up with the victims being blamed. 

We take our memory for granted. Dementia will steal it in ways most of us could never imagine. Winter Solstice by Diana Howard burrows deep into the heart-rending poetic journey of a daughter trying to love and help her mother who is slowly losing her memory. Through poems and vignettes written over a period of 15 years, the listener will enter a world of denial, confusion, shame, fear, humor, sacrifice, patience, and love, finding solace and empathy with an experience many of us go through, yet struggle to find words to describe.