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Your mom in rollers answers the back door and I ask are you home and she says sure darling and then calls your name long and loud up the stairs I wait It’s going to be a hot one she says to me and scratches under a roller why don’t… [Continue Reading]

Yesterday I painted my nails red. Understand, I am not one to grow long nails, never really have been and certainly not now when I’d never want a client to feel anything even remotely like a long nail on a shoulder, on a back, or while I’m fulcrum-ing their head… [Continue Reading]

I want to write about how I feel the tug of the other side, about how an awareness of not being, at least not in this form, sometimes makes my heart skip a beat. I wouldn’t call it fear, exactly, though maybe it’s fear’s distant cousin, or a half-brother. It’s… [Continue Reading]

I begged. “Please can we sell lemonade, please?” My friends Cari and Jenny stood next to me, nodding excitedly. Mom agreed. We lived in Wheaton, Illinois, that year. A block from the railroad tracks. Trains in Illinois were looooong and came often. It was not unusual for cars to be… [Continue Reading]

My soft friend, I feel hard, hard like a rock-hard. Cynical and paranoid like poker-faced border guards eyeing your passport, suspicious like security officials patting you down, their calloused hands rough, impervious to your tender. I feel envious-hard of the people making it, the connected people, the ones that are… [Continue Reading]

Heidi, for the love of all you love, do not do another thing until you write. And definitely, most definitely, do not talk to him —or anyone, for that matter— until you write. And also? Permission not to believe any of your thoughts, especially the conclusions your mind jumps to… [Continue Reading]

This morning I watched live footage of the miners in Chile being pulled out of the ground in a capsule after 70 days of entrapment. I heard the Chilean Spanish of my childhood, and felt very close to what I watched. I was amazed by the silence and sense of… [Continue Reading]

We arrived when the tide was turning, pulling upher hem like a mother who’d never once forgottenshe was a woman first and always. I went down to her edge, surely just to my ankles, I thought,but she lapped my legs and clapped her bawdy castanetson sand bars ever just up… [Continue Reading]