Category: Essays

A friend of mine has a burn scar, like a violet, asymmetrical puddle on the left side of her face.  When we were in college, she bought a cheap seat on a train ...

For Things Gone The red thread that opened a Band-Aid. Station wagon: the biggest (and tallest) car on the road. Movie moguls. True, they were often power hungr...

  When she turned 88, my mother and I agreed that it was time for her to leave the world where she’d spent her whole life and the Chicago condo she’d lived...

  Eden and I are in San Francisco, looking at Chagalls. It’s the summer of 2002, and there is a retrospective of the painter’s work at the city’s museum of...

  The shore is an ancient world, for as long as there has been an earth and sea there has been this place of the meeting of land and water. Yet it is a world th...

  It is the morning of my forty-sixth birthday and the sun just rose over the hills, painting them a watercolor pink.  I am sitting in the dining room of m...

Somewhere deep in my memory of children’s books is an image of the shepherdess tending her flock by the light of the moon.  An old, romantic tradition of doves ...

I seem to be having trouble with orientation.  Yesterday I stood on the mesa at Pueblo Alto and looked in the general direction of the people I love most in the...

Perhaps it was because of “Seymour,” a pony I rode on the beach. I hadn’t wanted to ride him; he was too small. But the hectoring Thai guys hawking pony rides c...

  Standing on the stone ledge of Blood Mountain, I have to check a foolish impulse to fly.   I put my hand to my eyes, surveying a blue that looks pristine...