Category: essays
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In the City
When Waze blandly informed us that it was twenty-five minutes to our hotel four miles away, I knew that we’d arrived. My husband and I had been talking about taking a trip to San Francisco for years – both when we lived across the bay in Marin and when we moved back southward – but…
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Mother’s Days
It is the twenty-second of April, and this will be my mother’s fourth hospitalization since the sixteenth of February, trapped in a deadly cycle of infections acquired, beaten back, acquired again. I text my brother and call Stacey, a friend of my brother’s and a private caregiver who for over two years has dedicated herself…
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A Is For…
San Luis Obispo’s Apple Store looks like it swaggered in from Manhattan or Union Square to see the sights, then decided it liked the low-key vibe and settled down on the corner of Higuera and Morro streets to stay a while. All chrome and glass and gleaming white, it cuts an aggressively stylish figure among the earth…
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Some Random Thoughts at the End of the Year
– We haven’t had enough rain – not by a long shot – but what we’ve had has washed the oaks clean and they no longer look like treasured knick-knacks that an old, ailing lady hasn’t had the energy to dust. – The contractor who remodeled our kitchen built a snug little shed to replace…
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A Walk in the Tiny Woods
The first time I drove from Long Beach to San Luis Obispo I was in my late twenties. A college boyfriend had graduated and decamped to Cal Poly for a masters degree, and despite it being the time before smartphones and Skype shrank emotional if not physical miles, we embarked on the folly of a…
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A Primer on Persecution
Even as I type this presidential candidates Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz are off to Kentucky to console jailed county clerk Kim Davis in her hour of despair, yet another victim in the relentless assault on religious liberty waged by unsavory political and judicial elements in the United States. For those who haven’t been following…
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The Old Sky
According to the Yanomami people, the world before this one was crushed when forces of chaos collapsed the sky, hurling Earth’s inhabitants into the underworld. Kinder deities raised a new one, and from the back of its fallen predecessor grew the forest where, when they clawed their way back above ground, the Yanomami came to…
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Thunderbird
The first time I saw a turkey vulture I thought it was an eagle. It soared along a ridge, far too large to be a hawk, elegant and majestic as it rode a thermal nearly out of sight. When my friend said it was a vulture I didn’t believe him. The first time I heard…
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Hit It with a Hammer
Bubble warning: Here There Be Liberal Sentiments. If the thought of drug-testing-free welfare turns you into a frothing rage monkey, you may wish to go elsewhere for today’s light political entertainment. A few weeks ago an elderly neighbor sent me an email entitled IF YOU CAN’T FIX IT WITH A HAMMER, YOU’VE GOT AN ELECTRICAL…
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The Wild Things
When my grandparents were still alive they lived in the remote Pennsylvania woodlands in a small stucco and stone home that my grandfather built himself. I spent a summer there just before my teens. I remember wandering through my grandmother’s garden of dahlias and snapdragons, mesmerized by all the color. I remember afternoons spent curled…
smallstonebuddha 