What is Economy Anyway? or Lessons from Home Ec.
Home Economics is a class I took in junior high where I learned how to follow a recipe, use an oven, and sew a usable, but lopsided duffel bag. It may have covered finances, but I don’t remember. I do remember the class was co-ed. I was delighted to be measuring and...
It’s Not Your Default–or is it?
In the days before my foreclosure process began, I sat at my desk before a pile of unpaid bills. I shuffled statements from one pile to another trying to make decisions about which ones to pay. An ache in my belly crawled up into my heart, traveled through my veins...
American Dreaming
I remember a morning just before my foreclosure process began. I was rushing to make my bed while simultaneously planning out what to put in my daughters’ lunch boxes. My youngest daughter, who was seven at the time, came in and said, “Oh mom, can I draw you a picture...
Giving Voice to the Silence of Foreclosure
When you speak into a silent room, or write on a blank page, you give voice. Giving voice is a gesture of belonging. It says, “I am here, I have something to say, I am part of this.” It seems so simple. Yet it can be excruciatingly difficult, especially if you are...
Thanksgiving or Thanksgetting?
I caved. After years of successfully not buying anything from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday as a protest against excess consumption and consumerism, I went shopping on Black Friday. For the last several years I’ve held my ground and kept Thanksgiving it’s own...
The Weight of a Heart
I found my way back home through an orange soapstone heart. I bought it for my daughter at the De Young Art Museum gift shop in Golden Gate Park when she was still heavy into her orange period. I noticed it on her desk last night as I lay in her loft bed with my face...
The Thing About Words After a Week in Silence
throat the sound of the word throat reaches my ears, plays my body as if I just discovered a new species of bird named for its bulging belly and the column of song arising from it throat breaks in my membrane shatters my imperceptible ambivalence to the present...
Each Day The Moon
I see the moon in the dark hours shining from the fold of the night ink I see the moon in the light hours lodged in blue like a new nickel dropped in sand Each day the moon sinks deeper down and in disappears for a time in the complete shadow then...
“When your write what wants to be written, you stop rejecting the life you have made.
You stop imagining some other place, some other lover, some other career, some other you. You take your life into your arms and call it your own.“