Response to "With Sweat Stripes Across Our Bellies"

I liked the story and the slow, home living type of telling to pull you through it. The story is about a woman who is learning how to deal with the way dementia is affecting her mother, even though she felt life around sick people as a career might have prepared her for it. This point is brought in at the very beginning but I think that maybe it would be nice to tie in the knowledge and other parts of her adult life into the rest of the story throughout. The recurring stream of conversation throughout the piece was engaging and built tension, but I would have liked for it to tie in to a more concise ending. At the end there was not a whole lot of closure or change that is discernible, and I would like to be able to latch onto a more concrete point that shows the development of the piece. I also feel like I know a lot about Connie, the main character, but I do not get much of her actual personality. I would like a little more there to give the piece a little bit more life. I thoroughly enjoyed the language that you used, and it seemed genuine and well placed. You did a good job of portraying the seemingly simplistic life of childhood and of a homemaker. The details, like in about the cooking, help tie this together. I would just like to see a little bit more conflict and something to bring that to fruition.