Karen Anderson
Essays by Karen AndersonKaren Anderson is a writer who lives and works in Traverse City, Michigan. She was a columnist for the Traverse City Record-Eagle for 30 years and published two collections.
Since 2005, she has contributed weekly essays to Interlochen Public Radio. An illustrated collection of her essays was published in 2017, “Gradual Clearing: Weather Reports from the Heart.”
Karen has a master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Michigan and is retired from Northwestern Michigan College where she was director of marketing and public relations. She enjoys camping, canoeing, reading, writing, listening, learning.
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I was smiling as I went on my way, surprised to discover how much pleasure it gave me to help these people. And I think most of us are really yearning to be of help to each other.
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How lucky, I thought, that I got to start out at the candy counter!
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The green cabbage was so big, it slipped out of my hand and rolled into the carrots just as the overhead spray came on, misting the vegetables and my shirt.
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Mildred was a large, middle-aged woman who sat in the back row of my workshop and told me she had to leave at the break. A few weeks later, I received a letter from Mildred, a letter that was postmarked Hawaii.
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I had grown up believing the body and mind were separate things, but I learned a new way of understanding
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In a world of people wanting to slim down, my daughter and I are trying to plump up.
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When I was 23 years old, I went to Europe for the first time with some women friends. None of us had much money but one of us had a book promising we could live on “Five Dollars a Day.” We also chose Icelandic Airlines because it was the cheapest.
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I think about how people used to try hard to last things. Today, almost everything is disposable. And I leave his shop wishing we could last more...
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I had heard about the Hindu belief in “sacred cows” and thought the whole idea rather strange and certainly unhygienic. Now I was sharing a sidewalk with them. Now I was watching a lovely woman touch the cow and touch her forehead in reverence. I could feel something shift in the baggage of my assumptions.