Pint-sized Maritime Explorers
If chores built character, I’d be a twelve-year-old Mother Theresa. Today, on a perfect summer morning, I stood in Annie Lee’s porthole-less gloom washing last night’s marinara from Mom’s sailboat emblazoned Melmac. Fish bones floated in the dying suds, making me...
Insurgence, The Spider, and Keeling Over
I crept along the deck behind Mom, fear of discovery quivering in my bladder as we played our dysfunctional family version of hide and seek. At twelve, I didn’t care that Nixon had banned TV cigarette commercials, particularly since we didn’t have a TV. Doonesbury...
Rain and Wisdom
Rain splatted against my calves and chin and one elbow as I turned cartwheels across the beach. Planted right-side-up, I shot a grin at Kate who had been throwing sand balls into the channel between our island and Pier 1. Kate dove into the water, her salt-stiff hair...
Dad’s Dreams
Sun winked off ice piled high as our T-shirt necks. Grins split our faces. Our knobby knees pumped full-tilt for the mound of “snow” the Canfields had scored at a Miami ice house, loaded into the back of a pickup, and dumped in the marina parking lot. ...
My Dad the Hippie
Hurricane Laurie gusted across the Gulf of Mexico, 105 mile-an-hour winds gunned for the Glades and south Florida. It was October 27, 1969, and my family barreled across Biscayne Bay under full sail, heading for a Hurricane Hole to wait out the storm. I planted my...
The Long Way to School
Like every morning, I pedaled hell-bent down Dinner Key Marina’s Pier 1, nearly rattling the teeth out of my head. Dad’s never-ending boat chores and a night spent cohabiting the aft cabin with a spider the size of my hand sloughed off me. I could almost see Dad’s...
A Cupful of Courage
I floated on my back in Biscayne Bay a few feet from the Annie Lee, trying to block out a lot of things I didn’t want to think about—the ten feet of water and blowfish beneath me; the Canfield kids, big-eyed in the front row of the Aristocats; the bundle of laundry on...
Bikes and Boats
My little brother viewed the dock’s ribbon of one-by-sixes as a personal drag strip for his rattletrap tricycle. R.J., whose swimming career had been confined to the bathtub, started half way down the dock and pedaled full-tilt the gauntlet of coiled rope, dock boxes,...
Happy Thanksgiving!
A personal Happy Thanksgiving to my blog readers! Hope you had a great holiday! Ann
I Can’t Get No… Satisfaction!
Jim trudged up the worn carpet steps of Fern’s, the Ashland, Ohio, boarding house where he lived while attending seminary. The steps creaked as he shrugged off his coat and the icy one a.m. air that clung to it. Downstairs, housemate Tom McConahay, his partner in...
The Good-bye Girl
Good-bye Girl, was the name of the movie Jim and I watched on our first date—a moniker I could have worn myself. I’d strung the elastic string of a candy necklace with crushes, adding and subtracting infatuations on a weekly basis. My affections were sweet, shallow,...
An Incandescent Ribbon
I marched, oblivious, through my first date with Jim as though it were no big deal—gritting my Florida-grown teeth against the frigid February First Ohio night. My fists jammed into the pockets of my coat. I trudged the ribbon of shoveled cement, snow glittering at...
Finding My Fish in the Sea
When I met the man who would own my heart forever, I thought something in me would stand up and cheer. But it didn’t happen that way. I sat Indian style on the floor of the packed living-dining room of the Alpha Theta House in September 1978 at Ashland College in...
Boys, Boys, Everywhere Boys…
I looked up from the front desk of Amstutz Hall at the coeds and frat guys funneling through the glass doors into the glare of the lobby lights. The scents of bonfire and beer drifted toward me as I reached for the girls’ keys in the mailboxes behind me. They hovered...
About Ann
Ann Lee Miller holds a BA and MFA in creative writing. She teaches writing online for Grand Canyon University. She’s lived in Ohio, Indiana, Arizona, and Oregon but left her heart in Florida where she grew up. Over 100,000 copies of her novels have been downloaded from Amazon. She is hard at work on a memoir-novel about growing up on a sailboat. When she’s not embroiled in a crisis–real or imagined–you’ll find her hiking with her husband or meddling in her kids’ lives.