These two balcony stories did not happen to me, but the cautionary lessons are many, so I repeat them here.
Story #1 comes from Mexico: Ms. Y and Ms. Z were sleeping in a rented beachfront condo and had locked all the first floor doors. Encouraging ocean breezes to lull them through their slumbers, they’d left [...]
Squosh, splosh, spwish, throth. These sounds are part of my winter morning walks on the slick clean tiles of a local mall. On my arc through the food court, I watch the women at Hot Dog on a Stick churning lemons for the drinks. Young women. Young white women. Young white women who are slim. [...]
Actually it was East Elfinwild Road, Glenshaw, Hampton Township, Pennsylvania, and it was a hell of a place to drive–or learn to drive–a stick shift. A windy two-laner east up the ravine from the river bottom, East Elfinwild Road was lined with trees, so a sunny day threw quick, blinding shafts across a driver’s eyes: [...]
The red-haired giant from Tennessee was showing me his gowns, trailing his fingers in a reverie along the satin and feathers that hung in his closet. “This is my favorite,” he gushed, pulling out the hem of a silky blue number. A photo of him wearing that dress and ten pounds of wig and makeup [...]
It didn’t snow for Halloween
The Pocahantas Halloween that skater’s winter
Hundreds of little white girls dressed as Indians
Too cold to go door to door
They raided the stores in the biggest mall in Anchorage
Moms wearing ranch mink
Carrying their daughters’ pink coats lined with rabbit fur
Those trap lines are so romantic
Sulking teenage clerks handing out cheap waxpaper twists [...]
It’s such a simple thing, a staircase. Yet I spent a good half hour with a two-year-old recently using the library stairs as a giant fascinating toy. Up, down, jump, fall, hold onto my hand, DON’T hold onto my hand, go up, turn around, step back down, do it again, repeat.
Fischer-Price doesn’t make stairs, [...]
Halene and I were eating lunch together, together for the last time as it turned out. “So, you remember that scene in Titanic where Jack sketches Rose lying nude on a couch?” Yes, I said. “Well, that was Dogie and me.” She was looking down at her salad and remembering her cowboy-painter husband who had [...]
Masculinity comes in many forms. Height, build, protectiveness, resolve, muscles, decisiveness, sensitivity, strength, courage, taking charge, heroism, bravery. And I witnessed all of those things in my man one day 16 years ago.
We were living on a bayou in Dickinson, Texas. Our estuary was alive with fish, ducks, and herons, and our neighbor’s geese patrolled [...]
I made my way through central Mexico by myself for a month in the summer of 1975. I’d finished my post-BA education classes to qualify for an Illinois teaching certificate, and I had just broken up with a longtime boyfriend. I flew into Mexico City from Chicago, took buses, walked beaches, swam, wrote, and [...]
I often tell new mothers about the “many weanings” a woman goes through and that weaning a child from breastfeeding is just one of many. Now I’m going through another weaning myself: as of this week, all my children will be living on their own.
My oldest son lives back east with two roommates in a [...]
