Kindred: 28 Reflections Shared Between Friends

By Sheryl McDonald and Michael Topp

When COVID hit, friends and running partners Michael Topp and Sheryl Ann McDonald were unable to meet up for their weekly runs so they needed to get creative. As passionate writers, Sheryl suggested that they challenge each other with weekly writing works that they could share on FaceTime. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Kindred Publishing
• Release date: Sep 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781737807025

Book preview

Just Write

Awriter writes. Every day. Even in the void or absence of the muse.

I must write every day. Something. Anything. It helps my life make sense.

Since the pandemic, I’ve created a ritual for my writing. I wake up, feed my pups, meditate, and go for a run on my treaddie I call Bettie. After a sweaty workout, I take a shower and let the endorphins electrify my brain.

Ahhh, hello clarity.

I prepare my writing space. My laptop sits on a lap-desk, which is a hard top with a pillow bottom. It has just enough room for my computer and mouse on top of its pad. The lap-desk allows me to sit in a comfortable chair and place my bare feet up on the couch.

I need sustenance so I cut up fruit: an apple, plum, nectarine and a small, peeled tangerine. I purposefully leave meat around the stones of the nectarine and plum, and the apple’s core because I bring them outside for the squirrels.

As I walk out the door, I make clicking sounds by sucking my tongue against my back molars. This alerts the squirrels that I left them a feast. Placing the fruit on the wall between our house and the neighbor’s, I smile in joy knowing I might see them walk across the wall, grab the fruit and carry it away to snack on in a tree.

I return to the kitchen and pour my coffee into my NBC Universal mug, adding Stevia sweetener and powdered Coffeemate. My laptop sits where my feet will soon be, on the edge of the couch. Fruit bowl in one hand, coffee in another, I set them down on the small round table next to my chair.

The last thing I need before I sit down is a bottle filled with ice cold water. My run left me parched, and it’s easy for me to jump into writing without a thought of hydration. These three items will be the only distraction for the next hour or two. Once I engage, it’s nonstop fingers to keyboard, God willing.

As I put my feet up on the couch and set my laptop on my lap, I begin the process by checking my email. Once that’s done, I go onto my Facebook page and scroll my feed for a few minutes. It’s easy to be seduced into numbly staring at the feed for hours on end. Not today. A writer writes. Microsoft Word is waiting to be launched. My story is waiting to be told.

I have a standing commitment to my writer friend Michael and a weekly writers group. It’s funny to think that something I do completely voluntarily is so much fun. Just like running. The miles click away behind me as an undistracted use of my body mechanics takes over.

This story may not be my best work. It may not be my worst. It is what it is. Words from my mind, coming through my fingertips as I glance out the window to my backyard with gratitude. I wonder if the squirrels came yet. How will my day unfold? As it should.

Today, I wrote. Mission accomplished.

Gentle, Strong and Kind

There was my mom, Sarah, gentle, strong and kind, maybe in her mid-fifties, treading a long sidewalk home from her work in a dress shop. Her boss dropped her off a half mile or so from our apartment, as he did every time. He never drove the extra distance. She was a small woman in a dark grey suit, walking after working on her feet all day.

She never complained, but on this day a couple of guys drove past and one threw an empty beer can at her and hit her in the chest. She thought only of getting home to her family, where the dinner she had cooked the night before would be getting heated up by me, her youngest, so all of us could eat together.

It must have been one of those hurts that echoed not in her body, but in her mind and heart. I was in the kitchen when she came into our apartment. My brother and father weren’t home yet. I stirred the pot of stew she’d made as she told me she’d been struck. At fourteen or fifteen, I did not know what to say. My mom, being the woman she was, simply told me the story and went to her bedroom. I knew such a moment would leave her angry, hurting and glad to be home.

My mom loved her work. It was back in the day of little dress shops in Los Angeles when she could call customers and tell them something had come in which was just right for them—and those women would show up because they trusted her.

She had worked in clothing sales since she was young. From way before the Depression to the war’s end, when she’d married my dad. She went back to dresses and fittings and cash registers when I was nine and my brother ten. That made my dad angry, but he also knew we needed the money.

My mom taught me many things. If she was not hurt or sick, she always went on with her responsibilities. That night, she didn’t hesitate to tell me, and then the family, what happened because she was simply an honest woman in our world. She had lived through so much sorrow and struggle in her life. Being hit with a beer can was just another moment. She’d needed to get home to us. She could always be trusted. I know she had no other way of life.

When she backed out of the kitchen and went to change her clothes, I kept stirring the stew. Soon she came in to take over