by Susanna Brennan

I, Little Bear, always scramble out of bed and get dressed when I hear my daddy, Poppa Bear, putting on his shoes in the morning. We rent a 300-year-old tenant house, former slaves’ quarters, on an old Maryland estate. The estate is still a working farm, with cows and chickens, and corn fields. Our home has wavy glass windows, and thick stone walls, spackled inside with horsehair plaster. We have a tin roof that makes tinkling music when it rains. Our ancient lumbering furnace was once coal fired, now converted to oil heat, and it’s a bit persnickety. There are just two closets upstairs, added in the last century. My daddy’s closet is just outside my bedroom door, tucked in an alcove at the top of the stairs, so I can hear when he’s up. He works as a staff member for a DC senator, and is going to law school, so my time with him is short. I learned from an early age that if I awake with him before dawn, I can steal some one-on-one time, before the rest of the family rises.

By  Barbara Janoff

There is a way of breathing that’s a shame and a suffocation 
and there’s another way of expiring, a love breath that lets you open to infinity.

– Rumi

When he was 70, about the age I am now, my father taught me how to harness the power of breath.  He had been an athlete in his youth, a welterweight boxer.  That must be when he came to know, although I think he’d forgotten it for many years. 

by  Judith Present

I was about eight; I think, when I walked passed my father’s office and saw him crying. For a child to see a parent cry is unnerving. True they are human beings, but children want to feel that their parents are stronger than they are and will always protect them. Walking into his office I saw him holding a photograph album. 

by Kirk Astroth

All day I’ve faced a barren waste

Without the taste of water,

Cool water

Old Dan and I with throats burned dry,

And souls that cry for water

Cool, clean water

–Marty Robbins, Cool Water