Day of the Dead, 2019
Last weekend, when we went to see the Dia de Los Muertos altars and display downtown, I really was blown away by their beauty and intricacy and all of the care that had gone into each one, and how the entire display in Grand Park was so dazzling. I spent a long time looking at […]
Where They From?
Here is something I wrote much earlier this year but still applies to our daily reality of living in this era of sudden forgetfulness of the American Dream. Where They From? (with apologies to Missy Elliott) January 17, 2018 In the week before Martin Luther King Day, the sitting president* of the United States made […]
My Father’s Bones
A couple of weeks ago, Lea Thau, founder and producer of the KCRW radio storytelling show “Strangers” interviewed me. It was a remarkable experience, and I enjoyed talking with […]
Feet and the maiden
Some years I am so weighted down and distracted by my workaday life that I have a hard time locating some authentic, profound feelings of gratitude around the holidays. This year, the news helped me locate some of these sentiments. Happy Thanksgiving, readers. As I slipped on my shoes and left the house the other […]
Supernatural: an intergenerational tale
Recently I found a link to audio from the first storytelling show that I participated in, the Spark Off Rose show from October 2010. The theme was “Supernatural,” and most of us told ghost stories of one kind or another. I read a story from the memoir manuscript I’ve been working on, about the few […]
The empty cart
Late January 2014 For the last several months I have been mentally flagellating myself, trying to declutter my garage. My husband, kids, and I moved into this house over three years ago, and the unpacking process was a never-ending Hydra of paper, housewares, and detritus from grad school and earlier. I claimed that I’d finished […]
The nature of the beast
This is my first dog, Genji, in 1999, when he was a few months old. When he wasn’t gnawing on nylabones or other chew toys, he spent some valuable hours chewing my Swedish wood clogs and a couple of pairs of underwear from the laundry hamper. His other pastimes included digging into my husband’s armpits […]
The Unpleasant Pensieve
This morning as I was having breakfast down in the yellow and blue kitchen here at Ragdale House, a place that calms me like an idealized version of the kitchen in my childhood home in Wisconsin, I had a conversation with the Ragdale housekeeper, R. In a mixture of English and Spanish, I learned that […]
Hybrid holidays
If you read my blog regularly, you know that this year, and every year at the holidays, I’m rather morose, joyless, and ungrateful. I feel guilty about it, which only makes things worse. Now that the holidays are over, I think I can diagnose some of what ails me. This is hard to write, but […]
