Category: Essays

  My mother Audrey was a birdwatcher. In the 1960’s, when she began pursuing this curious habit, four percent of the U.S. population admitted to bird watch...

  The humid heat of San Miguel Ixtahuacán leaves me sweat-soaked and out of breath from the steep climb to the house at the top of the hill. A woman opens ...

When my niece was born, I wanted her to stay tiny forever. At 5 lbs., 7 oz., she was too delicate for newborn clothes and her days in the NICU gave us time to f...

After my father had been diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer but before he was actually dying, a plant he’d never seen before appeared in the clearing in his ...

1. I have no scrapbooks, no shoe boxes crammed with keepsakes. No stash of yearbooks, diplomas, theater programs or halves of torn concert tickets, the first do...

We wanted to escape the family misery, and we were going to do it by moving out and getting our own place to live. That’s how we’d ended up here, walking from r...

I can hear Rips pounding on the living room window. “This will be the last time you lock me out of your house!” “If you break that window, I’ll call the police!...

When I walked in the door of their apartment at Villa Ventura, my father was sitting in his chair by the sliding door that gives him a view of the woods to the ...

In the quiet of a summer night, crickets chirping and sun setting, sipping a glass of American Honey on the back patio with my husband, I text my colleague to s...

  My father isn’t dead. But the man who I knew as my father is no longer with us. His thin frame slumps in a wheelchair in a family-style residence for Alz...