“Halo everybody, Halo. Halo is the shampoo that glorifies your hair, so Halo everybody, Halo.” This scrap of memory from my dream has led me backwards in time to an early morning 70 years before. My dad is long gone, out to feed the cattle or survey the wheat crop, my older sisters have vanished […]
Today as I walked by a shelf in my art studio, I read a glue label marked “Permanent Bond,” and my mind flashed back to when my niece gave birth. Excited over this first member of the fourth generation of our extant family, I had flown to Iowa from California and my mother had flown
I felt a strange touch on the back of my neck, like spiderwebs or cotton candy, but in spite of the unlikelihood of finding either in the antiseptic hospital room, I put my hand to the back of my neck in an exploratory gesture. Finding nothing there, I returned my hand to its automatic turning
The music of México is comprised of a cacophony of sounds—all of them loud! Trumpets, drums, violins, guitars, tubas and trombones are backed up by fiesta revelers, insects, burros, cattle, roosters, fireworks, church bells, air brakes, stone drills and vendors driving the street with loudspeakers announcing gas, produce, knife-sharpening or bottled water for sale. Living
There is Always Music Read More »
No matter how much we might admire ourselves, there is something off-putting about revealing the fact. For some reason, by pointing out our own good points, it makes others less likely to admire them. The one place where this fact of life is not true is in the resume, where we can revel fully in
Dare I Tell How I Excel? Read More »
It’s 6:30 on Christmas night. Red hot chili lights frame the dining room window—a leftover from the thirty years my mother spent in Tucson before moving north again to live in the town where my sister now lives. In the living room, Jimmy Carter speaks from the tv screen to my husband––the husband who has
Christmas Solitaire Read More »
Eight years ago, I drove to the Santa Cruz, CA, area to visit old friends. It had been fourteen years since I left there to move to Mexico, and when I spent the night with my friends Linda and Steve, they invited my other good friends Dan and Laurie to come for dinner. When we
These stories I am about to tell are true stories (or so I have been told) from San Juan Cosalá, the small Mexican pueblo where I have lived for 22 years. Those foreigners who live in the village would say, perhaps, that I am not really a part of it, and maybe that is true,
He clicked the scissors twice. On the first click, my stomach clinched, but on the second, I felt something break—like a tight rubber band. I didn’t look in the mirror to see the first lock fall to the floor, but by the second cut, I was ready to face facts. I looked to the floor
I was purified each Sunday, sitting on a child-sized wooden chair, belting out “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine.” Sure of salvation, my only worry was whether I’d forget the Bible verse memorized by repeating it every morning and every night for the preceding week. I was gloriously holy, worrying about
This Little Light of Mine Read More »
