Have another little piece of my heart now, baby. You know you got it if it makes you feel good. Glenda, my best friend’s mom, harmonizes with Janis Joplin’s gravelly voice like she’s singing the sacred anthem of wild women everywhere. She has a beautiful singing voice, so I try not to be too mad that the song has been on repeat for the last hour, but it’s grating on my already fried nerves. When we finally cross back into Wisconsin, less than two hours from home, I feel like I’ve stepped into my favorite pajamas after a long day. The hurly-burly left in me begins to settle.
Since we were little, Molly and I have lived down the street from one another in a small farming community tucked neatly between sprawling corn and soybean fields.…
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“It is quite possible that an animal has spoken civilly to me and that I didn’t catch the remark because I wasn’t paying attention” – Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White
Three or four books lie on my nightstand, commingled with hand lotion, emery boards, and lavender oil. The tabletop suggests the luxury of self-indulgence and the whimsy of arbitrary reading. I always have a thick hardbound book ready, a big long story whose purpose is completion. Self-improvement books also sprawl there, usually by Brene Brown or Gretchen Rubin, explaining how to get happier in my head or in my home. Sometimes I swap out the self-help book for a book about writing, hoping that reading about writing will overnight, subconsciously, develop my skills. A plastic-covered library book gathers dust, my interest as casual as my financial investment.…
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What country did I rule? What pirate did I befriend? Did I know Harry Winston personally? Whatever my past lives were, no doubt, I carried my passion for jewelry with me into this incarnation. I am VS1-clear on how important jewels are to me. Before I could walk, I accessorized. Baubles have fascinated me since day one, and I remember wearing a plastic teething ring as a bracelet. How kind of fate to bring me into the world in the month of the diamond. If only I were born wearing a birthstone ring.
While others carried dolls and toys, I carried my jewelry box with me in my young years. When playing with friends on the front stoop —yes, stoop, not porch, not steps, I grew up urban, inner-city — I’d take each piece out and position it on the top step, rearrange the necklaces, put all the rings together, then lift and coddle each piece before putting it back in the pink, cardboard jewelry box.…
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Recently one of my children aggressively grabbed another, and, with much sincerity and enthusiasm, cried, “I love you!” The child on the receiving end, also with sincerity but with less enthusiasm, responded, “I don’t love you.” The loving child repeated the sentiment one more time, in case the unloving child had not really heard correctly, but the response remained adamant. I could relate to both of them—the loving one had ventured into what was for them a rare moment of openness and vulnerability, only to be rejected, while the unloving one had been terrorized by the loving one for the better part of a morning and was only stating what was, in that moment, a truth.
Love has never been simple concept to me. I come from a loving enough family, but not one that likes to express this love verbally.…
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July 2017. As we depart from O’Cebreiro and enter the forest that wends down into the Navia Valley, Lou casts her daily intention into the dimming stars.
“Today I walk for my mom,” she declares into the darkness.
S. and I acknowledge it silently as Lou’s mom materializes in my mind. If it is the village that raises the child, she is in every sense my auntie, my elder, my second mother. On the cusp of her retirement in January she had received an initial diagnosis of cancer, but the prognosis was only confirmed a week before Lou left to join me—her cancer is endemic. Chemotherapy will prolong her life, but never save it.
I look up through the dark arms of the Evergreen Oaks and Portuguese Oaks, marveling at the silent intelligence of the trees. …
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In the early 1990s on a frosty winter’s weekend, I attended an international school job fair at Queen’s University. I had only been teaching in Canada for a few years, but there had been a freeze on salary for teachers in the Province of Ontario. I had taken loans to return to university to complete my Honours Bachelor of English & Drama degree. Due to the pay freeze, I wondered how many years it would take me to pay off those loans, that seemed to hang over my head like the Sword of Damocles. I drove from London Ontario, where I was living and working, to Kingston, and the attractive Queen’s University campus. I was nervous and excited at one and the same time at the prospect of possibly being hired to teach at an international school.…
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When I was eight, I developed a theory: if I were a boy, my mother would like me. I found, on a crumpled summer camp form under a school bus seat, a question about whether “your daughter” knew about menstruation or had menstruated. I’d never heard the term (I was in fourth grade but in 1966) so I asked the bus driver what it meant. He turned red and told me to ask my mother. I persisted; he refused to answer. My mother gasped, “You asked the bus driver?” She offered an account of which I understood little except “never speak of this with your brother.” Babies and blood seemed to be involved. At the dinner table, I brought up both, plus the new word, which I pronounced “menyoustration.”…
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