Bethesda Local Writer’s Showcase: 2026 Adult Essay Contest

I’m Greedy
By Joyce Siegel – Rockville, MD
1st Place

While looking out the window of my condo one day I saw a woman who appeared to be 30”ish” walking by. She had a sprightly gait and was dressed for the summer heat…short shorts, bare midriff, flip- flops.

I didn’t begrudge her the youthful outfit but I did envy her obvious youthful look (relative to my 92 years). I did envy her confident stride and perfect posture, neither of which I have. Once, maybe. Not now.

At my advanced age I’m using a walker. I have a wheelchair to use on an “as needed“ basis. For me, my longest self-propelled walk is in our apartment, from the kitchen to bedroom.

Most of what I want is on shelves that are now too high for me (I’ve shrunk). Grocery shopping, restaurant dining and theater going….almost everything I used to do have become more difficult. With restaurants it’s the usually crowded seating. The walker is always in someone’s way. Theater seating involves another problem since there are usually stairs and I need to be near an aisle because of the walker. It’s easier to just stay home.

I look in the mirror and don’t recognize ME. When about and around, my all-gray hair, my walker and my stooped posture announce OLD to everyone. Most people open doors for me and let me get ahead of them on lines. Some even help me unload my groceries from the shopping cart to the car.

Thinking about all of this and that young woman I saw from my window I think, too, about when I was about her age. I think of things I wanted to do but didn’t….about the trips I didn’t take and the books I meant to read…once or once again.

I feel greedy, even though I’ve had “my turn.” I feel greedy although I’ve done rewarding work (and received more than enough recognition for it.) Certainly I feel grateful too… especially grateful for my loving, attentive family (including my beloved eight grandchildren).

That gratefulness extends to my home. Unlike the majority of our earth’s population, I live in a secure, comfortable home, temperature seasonally adjusted. There’s a full fridge and artwork I enjoy on the apartment’s walls. I feel blessed. But, “blessed” is tempered by reality. The daily news is full of horror and despair. Anyone with an ounce of empathy must feel saddened and anxious in these troubling times. So, along with my “blessings” I worry about what’s ahead for my incredible grandchildren and for that 30ish, snappily dressed woman I saw from my window.

They’ll all have to figure how to deal with what’s ahead. They’ll have to face their inevitable aging. The only certainty is that nobody gets out of here alive. I envy them their problems. I’m greedy for more of that precious and so often taken for granted element …time.

Love in the Time of Alzheimer’s
By Kristin O’Keefe – Kensington, MD
2nd Place

You will have been married nearly 50 years when one of you forgets the way home. Some couples go to the doctor together to get an Alzheimer’s diagnosis; they cry and discuss plans and treatment. You will not take this route. You’ll laugh off forgetfulness, together. When one of you starts to misplace things, the other will quietly move them. You will start forgoing trips; you will accompany each other most places. You make it through this phase by silent but mutual agreement.

The next phase of Alzheimer’s arrives at the same time as Covid, just as you started exploring a senior living community. You are somewhat relieved, for you did not like the idea of moving. There are challenges: one of you forgets to turn off the stove, the other has issues with eyesight and mobility. It is harder to shower and manage all the steps. But there is joy in family meals outside, the slow walks around the neighborhood, the comfort of your cozy house in the woods. Every day you sit together in the family room, and every night you curl into each other.

Then you fall. The medical professionals say your house and its many steps are unsafe. You move to a senior living apartment near your daughter. Your art and couch are placed just so, to feel like home, but it is not the same. Still, you’re together. You go to meals in the main dining room, concerts, and lunch with old friends. But Alzheimer’s marches on, and one of you forgets even more, like how to cut with a knife, take a shower, get out of bed, and have a conversation. There are more and more battles.

You thought the first move was hard; this one is agonizing. It means you will not share a bedroom for the first time in 55 years. One of you is unaware until the move happens, the other is wracked with guilt, even though everyone says you are a good spouse. It does not feel that way, but you need more help.

Now you live one floor apart. Memory care is better than you imagined; the staff is kind and the residents have daily activities, including your beloved music. It is still hard—hard to wake up without you, eat without you, and watch tv without you.

But one thing is unchanged. Every night, without fail, you lie down together on the bed in memory care and hold each other until one of you falls asleep. The nurse says she hopes her husband loves her in old age the way you two do. When one of you moves to a wheelchair and it’s time for a hospital bed, you get a double, even though Medicare will only cover a single.

It is worth it, this most expensive bed you’ve ever owned. Because lying together, in each other’s arms, is what it feels like to be truly and fully you again.

A Small Visitor
By Diego Tovar – Chevy Chase, MD
3rd Place

When I was a child, summer was the world. Heat wavered above the ground, and the lush woods behind our house felt vast enough to keep secrets. The trees rose like familiar giants, their branches stitching patterns of shade across the path. Every trail felt like a doorway to something I hadn’t met yet.

One afternoon, the air turned so still that even the cicadas sounded unsure of themselves. I wandered into a clearing where an old oak had fallen seasons ago, its trunk now a low, rough bench. I climbed onto it and traced idle lines in the dust. My shirt clung to my back. A bead of sweat slid down my cheek and vanished into the soil, as if the ground had been waiting for it.

That was when the fly arrived.

It settled on the back of my hand, light and sure. Its calm weight kept me perfectly still. Up close, it was nothing like the nuisance people swatted away. Its body flashed with shifting greens and bronze, as if small lanterns burned beneath its shell. Its wings were clearer than glass. Even the fine hairs along its back caught the faintest strands of light.

The fly lifted one slender leg and drew it across another with the unhurried ease of a creature entirely at home. In its eyes, the clearing broke apart into countless tiny mosaics—the fallen oak, the soft green shimmer of leaves, and somewhere inside those fractured reflections, me, watching.

For a few breaths, the woods seemed to hold still with us. A lizard whispered through the brush. The branches above creaked tiredly. The world, usually restless, slipped into a softer rhythm, and I felt myself harmonize with it. I was no longer just watching but sharing a brief accord with a tiny neighbor.

I didn’t understand it then. I only knew a fleeting, tender grace was unfolding, bright and fragile as a soap bubble in the sun—a moment I wasn’t meant to look away from. My breathing eased. Curiosity widened, then settled into a feeling very close to awe.

When the fly finally lifted away, it rose as if carried on a thought, drifting into the sunlit air. My hand tingled where it had rested. I watched my palm all the way home, hoping another visitor might choose it.

After that day, the woods never felt quite the same. Every path seemed to listen back. Even now, I think about that brief meeting in the shade. It taught me what I couldn’t yet name: that every small life carries its own quiet story, and that the world sometimes opens through the narrowest of doorways, if we are willing to stop and look.

Keeping Vigil at the Party
By Joy Einstein – Bethesda, MD
Honorable Mention

No one ever talks about how sad first birthdays can be. They tell you to celebrate, inventory your miracles, count the ways you survived the longest, shortest year. But when she exhales upon that single, trembling flame and smears blue frosting in her hair, I do not feel triumphant. I feel the slow, sad burn of goodbye. I am not celebrating, I am mourning.

I know what the end of year one means. It means that pretty soon she won’t be my baby anymore, not like this—giggly, soft, and wild. It feels like a small vanishing. I can hear the future breathing in the next room, clearing its throat, like a speaker ready to take the podium. I am not ready to stand and let it in.

Lately I’ve been keeping vigil, fearing the slightest shift. I hoard her laughter, her baby belly laugh, as if I could tuck it in a drawer and open it again later. As the truly bereaved do, I record everything, living in fear that this or that might be the last time and I will forget to capture it.

I’ve been reevaluating religion too, just like I imagine people do when staring down death. Suddenly, I find myself reevaluating Buddhism and the idea of time circling back on itself. Reincarnation begins to sound less like theology and more like a vow: I will live, and live, and live again until I live the life that brings me back to her. Other times, I call her my angel and wince at myself, and then do it again, because somehow it is true. I can almost believe in angels and heaven, both of which I long since dismissed, because love like this keeps insisting on an origin I can’t explain. 

I’ve been bargaining lately too, like I suppose the truly sorrowful do. Give me one more baby, I say out loud to no one. I won’t spend so much time at the office with this one, I promise to the void. I won’t put this next one in daycare, I swear in the darkness, if you could just give me one more. I’ll be softer, slower, more grateful. But the night does not respond. The quiet knows what I know: I am older and more tired now than I want to admit, and another is not a possibility. And besides, even the next one would have a first birthday too.

Instead, with my fragile, shaky heart, I pose for pictures and lick cake off of her chubby fingers. It is a small ceremony with balloons and plastic toys yet underneath, a wake.

The Harvest
By Holly Mason Badra – Clifton, VA
Honorable Mention

My mother loves persimmons. I tried my first bite in the kitchen of the house where I grew up. I held out my hand for more. I bought some in my adult life and wasn’t as thrilled. Perhaps it was my mother’s love for the fruit that made it taste so good? Perhaps it was that my mother knew how to pick them out or knew when they were properly ripe?

I waited until I was six months pregnant to tell my parents. After two years of fertility treatments, I was focused on a healthy pregnancy and worried that the stress of their response would affect me. So, I waited.

Many years before this moment, when I came out to my mother, one of her arguments was “but you would be such a good mom.” I assured her, “I can still be a mom.” To which she replied “a child deserves both a mother and a father.” After I married my wife, once we started the fertility process, I tried to ease my parents into the fact that we would indeed one day be having a child.

In the summer heat, I put on my tennis shoes and walked my almost third-trimester bump around the neighborhood. I gave myself a pep talk trying to pluck up the courage to call them. Starting the conversation was always the hardest. I rehearsed my lines. I reminded myself I am a married, meaningfully employed, home-owning, 35-year-old woman. Shouldn’t they be proud of me? Instead, I felt like a teenager figuring out how to confess shocking news.

Kids ran by me waving their pool noodles, flip flops slapping the concrete. My neighborhood is the perfect cozy, suburban community for raising a child. I remember when we first looked at our house; the tall oak out of what would be the nursery window was turning red and orange, bikes rested in front lawns, and I pictured us becoming three here.

I rested my hand on my belly, passing a neighbor walking their dog. I said a quick hello and unlocked my phone. I called. I told them what should be “good” news. My father filled the silence with questions. My mother didn’t say a word, and I wouldn’t hear a word or see a word from her until after Iris was born. A text. The morning she was born to be exact. Incredible timing.

Now as I mother my own daughter, I feel a new pain for my mother and a new pain for myself. For the desert between us. Sometimes, often, the fruit is bitter.

A large persimmon tree in my neighbor’s backyard spills over the gate and onto the sidewalk. My brother says we should gather some. I bring them home, cut one when ripe, hand a slice to my toddler, and watch for her reaction.

Sometimes, sweet.

Packing Up Patan: The Weight of Memory
By Tara Prakash – Chevy Chase, MD
Honorable Mention

Note: this was written on October 14, 2025, while in Nepal on my gap year. We spent three weeks in a city called Patan, and I wrote this piece the night before we left.

We’re leaving Patan tomorrow morning. I’ve just finished dinner, and I’m packing my final items into my backpack and my extra-large duffel, which lay wide open on my bed.

I take with me my homestay sister’s giggle, the Saturdays waking up with her in the doorway to my room, ready for a game of Ludo. I’d slip on my house shoes and chase after her, calling her the affectionate name my parents called me 14 years ago, when I was her age: badmas. Mischevious. I take with me the surge of independence I felt, riding the bus alone one Saturday morning to Durbar Marg to explore the Nepal Point archives, using my ever-improving Nepali to navigate (“Rutna Park kahaa?”). Following suit from the other passengers, I cranked open my window and watched known landmarks pass me by. Ascend, the rock-climbing gym. The Kathmandu roundabout. The bakery I bought barfi from for my homestay mom, who mentioned it was her favorite sweet. I take with me the mint-green kurta I wore on Dashain and the generosity of my aunt, who refused to take it back when I tried to return it to her, thinking she gave it to me to borrow. “Tapailaai,” she said. For you.

I take with me my notebook, full of Nepali phrases, useful for haggling items down, finding directions home, clarifying a metal-working technique. I take with me the Sunday morning doing handstands at the Garden of Dreams, the walks to Labim mall, traversing the potholed city streets. I take a copy of the Nepali Times, picked up during a trip to Patan Bookshop. I read it voraciously that evening in my room, even annotating the Gen Z editorials, drawing question marks in the margins of dense paragraphs or underlining especially resonant sentences. I take with me ‘chiya guffing,’ gathering for tea in Swotha with different guest speakers.

I take my half-finished Buddha idol from my metal-working study project, packing it last, wrapped in cloth. My mentor gave me the instructions on how to complete it, along with a file, nail, and hammer. I take with me those afternoons in the studio, fingers and back aching, eyes trained on a single spot of the statue, memories that will surely come back to me as I continue the statue at home in the coming months.

My bag is heavy, so I leave things behind too. I don’t pack my inhibition, the awkward, unsure feeling when I asked someone, in Nepali, if we could have six eggs at the supermarket. I leave behind the Messi poster I bought for my 10-year-old homestay brother Samyak, the most adamant Messi fan I know in a family of Ronaldo diehards. He tapes the poster above his bed that evening, the room where we spent hours playing FIFA. I leave behind a wooden comb for my homestay aunt, who braided my hair every day before I left for the program house, different designs each time, fishtail and hairband and Dutch.

Walking the now-familiar route from Durbar Square to the program house, I lug my duffel bag and backpack. Both are heavy, stuffed full, bursting with the weight of memory.

For more information on the Local Writer’s Showcase, please visit https://www.bethesda.org/bethesda/localwriters