How to Practice True Economy
For those who have miraculously found their way above the flood line, to rest for a moment, while the waters recede. — Joel Matthew Gunderson, “A Last Level of Anxiety” While we waited for our menus, my ten-year-old daughter and I marveled at the elegant dining room. We had been seated out of the way, […]
The Puzzle
The week before our first date, we texted constantly. At the art store with my daughter, while she shopped for pens, I bought a color-your-own puzzle: a sheet of white chipboard cut by jigsaw. I would write this man a love-letter, paint over it with watercolors, and deliver it to him in pieces in an […]
2022 In Review
At the end of last year, Julia gave me a stoneware crock, and I decided that I would use it to keep record of the good things and the bad things that happened over the course of the year. Every time something really extraordinary happened, I would put it on an index card, fold it […]
Protected: Butter
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How to Have a Sleek Pelt
“Pussy will and can do a lot of other things to you, though.” — M.F.K. Fisher The first incongruous piece of the strip club was the leatherette A-frame table tents. I had just been hired, it was my first day as a dancer. Outside, it was early summer; the light lingered in the sky. Inside, […]
The Wolf Tetralogy, #4: How to Boil Water
“The natural progression from boiling water to boiling water with something in it can hardly be avoided, and in most cases is heartily to be wished for.” —M.F.K. Fisher The next morning, I checked the local news online, sitting at my desk with a cup of coffee. I searched for the Baker’s name, along […]
The Wolf Tetralogy, #3: How to Carve the Wolf
“Heavily-inked chefs and cooks, culinary lone wolves, maniacal attention to detail, something’s happening here, and I don’t know what it is. Yet okay. I know what the Pacific Northwest is about. It’s about Obsession.” — Anthony Bourdain “Ghosts are not worried by wolves.” —M.F.K. Fisher The next night, my boyfriend drove us across […]
The Wolf Tetralogy, #2: How to Catch the Wolf
“It is true that, when the wolf first proves he is actually there, you feel a definite sense of panic.” — M.F.K. Fisher Bouncing slightly on her toes, barefoot in the bathroom late at night, my eight-year-old daughter brushed her teeth. I caught glimpses of her from my seat at the kitchen table, where I […]
The Wolf Tetralogy, #1: How to Distribute Your Virtue
“You can still live with grace and wisdom, thanks … partly to your own innate sense of what you must do with the resources you have…” “How to Distribute Your Virtue,” by M.F.K. Fisher I wrote this last year, on the 32nd anniversary of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake. You went out […]
How Not to Boil an Egg
“Probably one of the most private things in the world is an egg until it is broken.” — M.F.K. Fisher My mother came into my bedroom when I was eleven years old to show me how much blood I was going to lose each month; she carried the little glass measuring cup by its […]