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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Designated Celebrant: Confessions of a Holiday Hater
December 18, 2012: It’s a week before Christmas. Since we’re a mixed religion family and Hanukkah has passed, my kids have opened most of their holiday booty from my husband and me and the rest of the family. I tried to remain neutral about the holidays, waiting with no fixed expectations for joy, peace, wonder, […]
(Poverty) is like a box of chocolates
When I was in the grocery store last week, I saw these fancy chocolates. They are delicious, as I know from personal experience. But I could not bring myself to buy any, even “just for guests” or “for the kids,” two of my usual excuses for buying extraneous treats. The taste of these candies is […]
Finding Grateful
I feel a very unusual sensation — if it is not indigestion, I think it must be gratitude. -Benjamin Disraeli When I started counting my blessings, my whole life turned around. -Willie Nelson According to some of my Facebook friends, November is an unofficial month of gratitude, where each day a participating person is supposed […]
A brief history of racism
Last week, the Associated Press and other news outlets reported that racial attitudes have gotten worse, not better, since the United States elected its first African American president four years ago in 2008. Those who admitted to having anti-African American feelings rose from 48% in 2008 to 51% in 2012. If the researchers included implicit […]
