Exploring the Jungle —Mary Lott

I sleepily scratched a bug bite on my arm. It felt a bit different from a mosquito bite — perhaps it was from a red ant or a spider. I rolled over and went…

“It rained and it rained and it rained.” That’s the beginning of the ninth chapter of A.A. Milne’s “The House at Pooh Corner.” Piglet tells himself that he’d never seen so much rain in…

Waking groggily, the patient stretched his arm out from under the covers. Hitting the “stop” button on his phone, he groaned. It was time to eat and take his next dose of anti-nausea medicine.

My breath was short and quick. Pokey, my dog, jumped up on the bed and licked my face. It didn’t help. Thoughts continued to swirl through my brain, not settling down into one focus.

My husband and I went through our checklist. “Do you have a week’s supply of your inhaler?” We try to keep supplies on hand, just in case. We have contingency plans for disasters, such…

Pokey was nudging my hand, forcing me into consciousness. He was rolling his eyes, dancing around, and almost crossing his legs. “Get up, Mom! I have to go out.” Pokey is my dog. I…

“You’ve reached 911. What’s your emergency?” My daughter Beth answered the call, ready to direct the correct emergency department to the scene. Nothing in that job is routine, but she didn’t expect the situation…

Give ear, me hearties, and listen to my tale. It’s a story of riding the high waves and plunging into the troughs between. Me tale begins many a night ago as the…

I looked about in wonder. The prairie — the vast, great American prairie, which reputedly had vistas so wide that the horizon was far off in the distance — filled my vision. But the…

“Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.” Dorothy Gale in L. Frank Baum’s “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” was quite disoriented when a tornado whisked her and her dog,…