Excerpt
Excerpt from "The Anole Story"
I am an unusual female. I hate to shop. I make my way through a department store, or heaven-help-me, a mall, only when I am in serious need of clothes for an upcoming event or vacation. And then it is a solo pursuit. Unlike my mother, I never call a friend to go shopping for the sheer pleasure of it. Browsing is not a part of my repertoire.

As if the normal contrariness of teenagers wasn’t enough, to torture me even further, my two daughters had to pick shopping as the mother/daughter bonding activity of their choice. Now that they’re grown and gone, our bonds secure from all that shopping, I relish the prospect of never having to accompany another loving soul into a building which also houses a cash register. The two males in my household, my husband and sixteen-year-old son, despise shopping. My son is on the forefront of a new generation that buys everything online.

But recently, new driver’s license in pocket, he is on the lookout for errands to run. This brings him out of his room, where he has been holed up for the past two years with the door closed, and into my kitchen, a bit more conversational than the monosyllabic replies I generally receive when I ask about his day.