Melanie Anne Phillips

  Mommy   Many years ago, when I was five, or thereabouts, my mother was taking me on a road trip. She and my father had divorced when I was one, and since then, she had devoted herself to creating a world for me filled with love, wonder, and new experiences.   I don’t recall where we were headed in her little gray coup, but it was a long enough trip that she had made us a lunch for the road, all neatly wrapped in wax paper and packed in a bag.   My memory begins when we pulled over to eat after some time on the highway. Mom opened the bag and handed a sandwich to me. Money was tight when I was young, and mom was ever-inventive, so for this trip she used what was available and made tomato sandwiches – white bread with mayo, sliced tomatoes and a little salt and pepper.   Unfortunately, by the time we had stopped, the juice from the tomatoes had sopped into the bread, and when I opened my sandwich, parts of it were literally dripping off as the two slices dissolv...

  Miss You, Dad   I had a dream about my dad just a few minutes ago. I was out with Teresa and my sisters and one of their husbands and their mom. We were in Redmond, where my dad lived, and we were all out in the late afternoon for dinner. In the dream, my dad was back home still fighting his cancer. Apparently, we had just left there after a visit.    I suddenly realized there was a voice saying, "hello?" from my pocket. I reached in and found an old cradle-phone hand set that had apparently been bumped and accidentally dialed my dad back at the house.    I picked it up and talked to him, but he was so very groggy and incoherent I had clearly waken him up. The more we talked, however, the more cogent he became until he was back to his normal, very intelligent and charming self.    And then we were both there in the mall where the family was going to have dinner. They were going into the restaurant, and I as with him at a round concrete table alo...

  The Green of Ages     I grew up in the house I'm living in right now. In those days, back in the 1950s, the exterior walls were a crisp, clean white, and the trim was a deep forest green (or perhaps a tiny bit more yellow than that.   Later, it was all covered up with pink aluminum siding in the 1960s. Even later than that, my son, Keith , took off all the siding single-handedly (HUGE job), and then I paid for some painters to repaint the white walls which were still beneath.   Now, that light blue paint is peeling, so Teresa is chipping it off by hand with a putty knife, my grandfather's old wire brush, and lastly blasting it with the pressure nozzle on the hose because the original paint has become all chalky - it was probably the original paint from when the house was built in 1941!   As you can see, there's some history in this endeavor. While removing the blue paint, Teresa discovered that a few small patches of the original green trim were still on ...