HeyJaredKathryn Mayer | Writing Out Loud
My personal Substack with stories about boring everyday life with universal implications. Applications. Will google later.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 9
- Latest publication
- Sep 20, 2026
- Audience
- Checking…
- Earliest in this view
- Jul 6, 2026
Latest issues
volleyball doesn’t get sick (opens the original)
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I heard her before the elevator doors even opened. That booming voice she inherited from our dad, his able to bounce off the rolling hills in our small town to call us home, or make us jump out of our skin when we’d sneak TV instead of doing homework. My sister was loud, like him. A clap of thunder loud, not fingernails on a blackboard. Not yippy, squeaky, or scratchy, and never, ever whiny. Firm and booming, authoritative and bossy. She wasn’t taking suggestion
fabric of her life (opens the original)
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My grandmother lived in a dingy single-wide in a dying town way, way upstate New York, close enough to Lake Ontario for the wind and lake-effect snow, but not for the stunning sunsets. Heavy drapes pulled tight against doll-house windows, not meeting despite her best efforts to close out the sun, sometimes with clothespins, and piling up and over the back of the ‘davenport,’ competing with afghans for prime real estate. Like a chocolate soft serve, dingy brown curtains coil on top of a tiny RCA
bare bones living (opens the original)
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My sister’s house is immaculate. Perfect. Everything has a place and purpose. No extras. Looks like a Raymour & Flanigan showroom. Or a Residence Inn. Maybe a Hilton. The only personal items hang professionally on one wall: beautiful photos of her kids, her grand, her horses and dogs. The rest could be any home, or rather, any nice, clean, cozy, safe, non-descript hotel room off a highway in a town you’re driving through.<a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" href="https://substackcdn.com/
free reign (or reins: tomato, to-mah-toh) (opens the original)
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On a slight jag of the Appalachian Trail near where I grew up, a dirt path veers off my country road, leading up a hill so steep it’s hard to climb, except I’m riding my pony Secret, with the other barn kids, maybe Kelly riding Angie? Could have been Tammy on Peaches, and most definitely my cousin Mark, on Brandy. <a class="image-link image2 is-viewable-img" href="https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Xirw!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-
village pharmacy (opens the original)
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My first job was shit-shoveler and taking out trail rides at a horse barn down the road. I could do that job at 10, 11, 12, but when I finally got working papers at 16, I got a real job at the Village Pharmacy downtown, with a W2 and whopping minimum wage of $3.10 an hour, or maybe it was $2.90. Somewhere around that.How I remember the ballpark wage, I do not know.The job came complete with a wood-paneled colored name tag, my name engraved in white, to safety-pin onto the sky-blue polyester smoc
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