Rita A. Miles

I held the brown, letter-sized envelope in my hand and wondered… What did she send this time? Curiosity impatiently urged me to open the dang package and find out—so did my husband. Yet, lived experience quietly warned caution. Though a much smaller envelope than this one, the last one contained a surprise gift from my mother in the form of the dried-up piece of umbilical cord from my birth decades before. Mind you, I am a mother and a grandmother. So, I’m not ordinarily squeamish about...

The first crow came from the east just as she was dragging an old tire across the yard. It belonged to a life she no longer wanted to explain—one of those leftovers from a marriage that had ended in silence and left scattered bits strewn across the yard of her existence. Tires. Pipe. Rusted metal. A ladder too heavy and too tall for an aging woman to appreciate. For years, she’d tried to pretend the clutter did not exist. Neglecting it and herself. When she couldn’t avoid it, all she could...

What ingredients are flavoring your life? Once upon a time, a very thoughtful little girl named Rita (I know…fitting, right?) sat thinking about life and what she wanted to do with it when suddenly, an idea struck—bread! She wanted to make magic by creating the perfect loaf of bread. Mind you, she had made bread many times before, but she’d never created what she would define as the perfect loaf. Decided, she set about checking all the cupboards, digging and burrowing into even the...