by Donna Salli | Nov 11, 2025 | Blogs
I love this picture, rocking my button of a purse, my cute little hat. I look ready to make tracks on my trike, parked there behind me. I’m in my seventies now, and I’m thinking hard about my life—looking back, and of course wondering what time I have left. Have you ever been on a train as it crawls through a switching yard? Tracks go helter-skelter, crossing one another, this way, then that. At different junctures, I’ve turned down a new track—because I wanted to, at other times because I had to. As a writer, it seems natural to me to think out loud about my experiences. The poet Emily Dickinson said, presumably about herself, “I’m Nobody! Who are you?” Her approach to life rings true for me. I think we’re born to figure out who we are, and why we are—unpretentiously is my preference—and to honor and respect other people in their searching. …
by Donna Salli | Jan 17, 2023 | Blogs
I’ve spent the last month remembering youthful hours in the sun, glorious hours—bikini-clad, canoeing the Wisconsin River, and later wearing hip sunglasses as I backpacked, over a span of years, in the Utah mountains. Those memories now rise up with less luster as I’ve found myself treating wonky spots of skin on my nose, spots with the potential to become cancerous. Every night before bed, I’ve coated them with a “chemo” cream and in the morning washed it off. As the cream began its work, I met with creeping dismay the frightening person who suddenly gazed back from the mirror. Nose harshly red, scabbed, angry—she would scare a child. My mother used to say, when I was still at home and would make some sort of ugly face, “Keep it up and it’ll stay that way.” I’ve now completed the treatment, but at its height, I’d look at my nose in the mirror and think, What if it stays this way? It’s been a time of wrestling with who I am, why I am, and whether to be embarrassed about either. There’s a saying: “Vanity, thy name is woman.” I’ve pondered that idea mightily over the last thirty days. I’ve also been thinking, more importantly, about my grandmother Hilda.
by Donna Salli | Sep 12, 2018 | Blogs
The photo at the top of this post is of my mother, Rauha, reading the newspaper in her room at our family farm. A few years ago, she made the hard decision to sell the farm and now lives down the street. She is deeply private, doubly so because she’s a Finn. We Finns are famous for our reticence. Mom would draw apart to that room, sometimes sleeping, sometimes reading. I quietly snapped the photo that winter day, wanting to preserve the moment and even the place. I could see the day coming when we would no longer have the farm, its quiet fields and serene tree line. I was sensing the approach of days so upending that I’d want to make my own retreat to the woods.
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