Category: Blogs
Departure
Youngest leaves for college today. Our house appears to understand. Our house appears to understand. Water heater breaks, ceiling weeps. I grab a mop, sweep up the weeps. Sam the Appliance Man is booked. Every plumber in town is booked. She carries on, keeps packing up. Nothing stops her from Read more
Loneliness Looks Like Hunger
For a while, you lived in a room without a TV Or a garbage disposal, and it was so quiet You heard the refrigerator moan, two dogs Barking at each other in the alley, somebody On the roof watering. You’ve been alone all day Except for 10 minutes when the Read more
A Love Deserved
Sebastian points to the letter T, alone in the center of the child-sized magnetic white board. T for Tyler. T for tired. I sit criss-cross applesauce next to my four-year-old charge, who is excited and proud he’s found the letter that’s been missing from the set for days, and glance Read more
Shapeshifting
The shape of heavy tears streaking down, earthwards, journeying to find our loved ones faces, again The shape of trembling lips the very moment we recall their forevermore absence as we write the date, on this day their birthday The shape of the book on the shelf in the store, Read more
Lessons in Healing From the Aisles of Target
August 2016 I’m kneeling in the aisle like a worshipper dropping tears into the white ceramic shell of an armadillo. What else would you do on your inaugural Target run in a new town you thought you would love but don’t even like? Read more
A Bald Girl
My mom had it. I know she had hair in all of the pictures of her before I was born. I know she had hair when I was little. I know she got her hair done at Menage e Trois Coiffers on Burton Way, and I didn’t know what “Menage Read more
After Hours
I’d arrived in Los Angeles two years earlier, on New Year’s Eve, 1979, after completing graduate work at the University of Minnesota and deciding that I wouldn’t survive another midwestern winter. So after a three-day road trip in my ex-husband’s Chevrolet Impala that included striking a deer in South Dakota, Read more