One of my college writing classes started every morning with free-writing as a warm-up. The idea of free-writing is to put pencil to paper and write without stopping for three minutes—just let the words flow. I have no idea what I wrote most days, but once the subject was grandmothers—yours, the cliché, whatever. Mine had died recently. I didn’t want to deal with those feelings, so I started writing about my grandmother’s...

If you meet a hobgoblin and he asks for a coin, find one. Dig deep if you have to. Otherwise, he’ll turn the forest around and you’ll lose your way. When I read that old eastern European tradition, I thought, THAT explains it. Aren’t we all lost in one sense or another? Maybe, we aren’t paying the hobgoblin. Too many of us underestimate the Little Folk. Or think we outgrow them. Generations past didn’t make that...

How we tell our stories makes all the difference. For example, my grandma Melba had an original spin on Aesop’s famous fable of the ants and the grasshopper. According to Aesop, (620-560 B.C. Greek slave and famed storyteller) the ants were busy, as ants usually are, putting food away for the coming cold. The grasshopper preferred to sun himself and fiddle. Of course, when the seasons changed, the grasshopper found himself hungry and without...

We’re not down to bartering with matches. Between the first and second world wars, before my grandparents immigrated to this country, Germany went through hyperinflation–a time when money was worth less and less, hour by hour. My grandmother, Marta, would stand in line on payday, get my grandfather’s check, cash it, and immediately spend the whole amount on something, anything, that she could later use as barter. Of course,...