Carla Merolla Odell
Personalized Portraiture
When Ken and I married four years ago this past October, we had a small wedding. And while we’d asked that guests “just bring yourself” – discouraging any gift-giving – my bff and her partner showed up with a ginormous, need-a-forklift package, which, when I unwrapped...
Home during my freshman year in college, my mother called to me from the guest bathroom I was using. “What?” I said, as I rounded the corner and saw her holding my plastic dial-a-day pill dispenser. “You’re on birth control?” What followed was not what I would have...
When I was a young thirty-something, my then-husband and I had a summer share with friends on Fire Island; and as most do, ours began on Memorial Day. Every Friday of that long weekend during those five or six thirty-something years, it rained on the ferry ride to...
I used to be a chair-dancer. Which means, when music played, my upper body moved, but my legs didn’t get the memo. So at parties and weddings, whenever the band got going, I stayed put while rolling my shoulders and snaking my arms to show I was in 50 percent...
I held on to her small hand as we made our way along the path. About 20 feet ahead of us, a giant spider was walking with Scheherazade. “See, you’re not the only one who got dressed up,” I said. “Good thing,” she replied. “But I hope I’m the only wicked witch.”
If someone had asked me to create a list of adjectives to describe myself, “outdoorsy” would fall just below “gourmet.” I was a New York City girl who ordered toast to go. When I say I live in the country to my neighbors here, they laugh. They laugh because we are...
On the last leg of our journey up the coast of Maine for our vacation, my husband and I stayed in a hotel south of Portland. During breakfast, we struck up a conversation with Billy, a Mainer who didn’t have to travel too far for this year’s national Corvair...
I wasn’t a big fan of Rachael Ray’s Food Network show. My male friends really dug her, in that Mary Ann vs. Ginger way, and especially found her throaty vocals sexy – an effect I’m able to create every February, recovering from my yearly bout of laryngitis. However, I...
Only in the dictionary does "long marriage" come before "successful." Christmastime eventually became the War of the Orbs. He began weighing the branches with tiny replicas of handlebars and helmets from Harley-Davidson. I doted the tree with ornaments set in doilies...
To many, this is a philosophical question, and while the discussion doesn’t date back to the marble steps of some ancient Greek agora, it is generations old: “Beatles or Stones?” …Stones. I was 14 that July when I told my mother I wanted to spend a few days with my...