Five Minutes explores five minutes of a life in one hundred words. Five minutes is edited by Susanna Baird, with editorial support from managing editor Maria s. picone, newsletter editor kate meen, and founding reader bobbi lerman, plus our rotating team of guest readers, who you can meet in the latest newsletteR. Five Minutes was founded in October 2020, with the Salem (Mass.)-based writing group Carrot Cake Writers supplying the journal’s first pieces. We’d love to read your five. Submit here

Highway Epiphany

The haul from Washington to Boston on interstates and turnpikes is hell for vehicular density, surface conditions, and the pulsing polarity of too much and too little speed. I was resigned to the misery until the epiphany. It came while heading to Canada, and my Road to Damascus was the New Jersey Turnpike. As I sat motionless in an hours-long jam, worried I might not make it to the next exit before nightfall, the most fragile of all creatures passed by my windshield, a live-free-or-die butterfly, mocking my self-imprisonment. I vowed to follow the butterfly to a road less traveled.

Richard LeBlond is a retired biologist living in North Carolina. His essays and photographs have appeared in numerous U.S. and international journals.

Spring Cinnamon

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