Gazpacho and Love
It’s past midsummer here, and even though we live in the middle of Los Angeles, my husband I have a bumper crop of tomatoes. We grow tomatoes, strawberries, basil, and other herbs in Earth Boxes in our backyard. And blueberries in a wine barrel on wheels. It’s my small nod to having grown up on […]
Keeping it real (estate)
Exactly three years ago my husband and I entered the uniquely grownup, age-accelerating experience of buying a home. I have posted this before, but early summer and all the “for sale” signs around town when the weather turns warm always remind me of it. And I’m finally at a point where I don’t start to […]
My selfie, myself
I recently finished reading the excellent, heartbreaking memoir Autobiography of a Face by the late Lucy Grealy, which made me ponder what role a face plays in one’s identity. A Twitter friend (who I actually know in real life — a wonderful poet) the other day referred to “selfies” (that is, self-portraits, particularly taken with […]
Aloha, tristesse **
This is a post I meant to write in early January. File under “sad synchronicity” and “strangers on a beach.” My family went to the Big Island in Hawaii for the week between Christmas and New Years. I was in a funk, as I often am at the holidays, raw and exhausted and not in […]
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 […]
Some Places Where I Used To Live
(Yes, the title is a lame reference to the Gotye song of last year, Somebody That I Used to Know.) This year I’ve had the opportunity to visit two cities where I used to live. Last month I visited Boston when I attended the AWP conference. And right now I’m at an artists’ residency just […]
The house of the opposite of mirth
I’m just back from spring break vacation with my kids. As usual, it took nearly the entire trip (five days) to relax. But we had fun and much needed bonding time, free from the usual soundtrack to our familial relationships — do your homework; brush your teeth; brush your teeth NOW; hang up your swim […]
Amateur Night
Chain chain chain! Chain of fools. (Quoth the longtime fool.) I took this photo out of the moonroof of my car on Valentines Day, as my husband and I fought five minutes of traffic to go to our favorite Japanese restaurant. Normally traffic is about like this on Thursday nights at rush hour, but I […]
Exit the bubble
So I took this writing workshop early in January with David Hochman, writer extraordinaire, and fellow Vassar alum. And it was good. Inspiring. Delicious, because his wife Ruth Kennison, a real live pastry chef and chocolatier, made us incredible lunches and snacks. I left with some new writer friends and concrete ideas about how to […]
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 […]
