Blog : Beautiful-Things
Waiting for Owls (rerun)

Evening returns to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, and the land cools. Day follows the sun across the valley floor and up into the mountains in the west. Birds settle down for the night.
The Sweetness of Figs

I am at home here like I have not been anywhere else in my life. Home in the heat of dripping fig trees, their treacle tears that drop-by-drop onto the dry ground, the sour smell of wine in the air....
Excalibur

We sprinted by the worn house with the closed blinds that reeked of pot and who knows what else. I gave the leash a short tug and we slowed to a walk again....
Mail Order

You know what I heard, I heard your mother was a mail order briiiiiiide. The girl with a thoroughly sensible name in my first-grade class drew out the last word, and I struggled with the new sentence structure....
Leave-Taking

Sassafras, shagbark hickory, spicebush, paw paws and sycamores marked the descent to the creek. The untillable acres, as they call them. The hills too steep and outcrops too rocky. The forgotten backs of farms....
The Petals of Summer

They lie like bits of tissue on the bathroom floor rug, caught in the fibers; I bend to pick them up and see the yellow and pink threadworn veins, dry and broken and translucent pieces of geranium and nasturtium....
This Is What Men Do

At the tiny Eretz Shalom Cemetery on the mesa south of Taos, I feel like I have stepped into a John Ford Western. The impossibly big New Mexican sky dwarfs the mourners standing in sagebrush around a six-foot-deep hole in the ground....
Wish You Were Here

Our three-year-old sits on my husband's shoulders, bouncing. Red rock and yellow cottonwood trees and blue sky surround us. Fall break in Capitol Reef, Utah, and we’re winding up a trail we’ve never hiked before to see an arch...
Tell Me

Show me the shape of your thoughts when the doctor announced my cancer. Reveal the colors and the shadows. Tell me not the lines, but the in-betweens, right to your bones. Lament with me the unrest of memories yet to be lived, then speak them...
The River and How She Heals

When the house went cold - not the oxygen and nitrogen, but the mood, the atmosphere around my parents - when that froze into stasis, into wariness, into step-lightly-quietly-invisibly, I would retreat outside where I could breathe without...
The Dancer

Mom danced with The Dancing Divas - women in their seventies proudly performing in over thirty elaborate costumes. Accessories included a Fedora with a plastic mafia machine gun, a red suitcase doubling as a small platform for tapping to...
Guavas

This morning I went out to the garden with my mom and picked up guavas, tiny yellow pieces of fruit that had fallen from the tree and now lay scattered on the ground. I bent over and picked them up, one by one, thought of the time when there was only...
Wrinkles

They surround her eyes, her nose, and her mouth. She likes to touch them, to run her fingers over them, to try and count them, although it is nearly impossible to see where each one starts and ends. Each wrinkle seemed to appear with a major...
On Belay

When I climb, my husband catches me. Peter is younger than me, lankier, quieter. His body weaves up rock with a grace my shaky, short frame cannot yet settle into--but he's learned not to correct or coach me. Instead he holds me on belay...
Learning to Tell Time

Learning to Tell Time Corpus Christi, Texas: February 1, 1969 It will always be eighty degrees in Corpus and I will always be six when the telegram comes. For me, this day will always have passed as if it were any other. I will always be inside...
Idols

In September, they carry Ganesha to the river. The bedazzled elephant god sits Sukhasana, mala of flowers around his neck, unlikely to swim. My inherited religion is about a man who rose from the dead, his bloody corpse the symbol...
Reunion Tour

Thud of drums, The Edge’s guitar lick reverberating in our sternums, and the first flinty sound of Bono’s voice. We never expected...
Controlled Burn

Spring is the season for burning on the plains. Ranchers across the tall grass prairies of Eastern Kansas watch the forecast for the stillest days, when wind nests between mountains, before they bring the driptorches to the fields.
Pop-Pop

If I put my ear to the hardwood, will I hear the shuffle of his steps? The velcro shoes? I never saw him with his socks off. I imagine his toes like his fingers: thin with long thick yellowing nails. "To grab things with," he told me...
Passenger

I nest, my sleeping bag encircling me as I sit, skin-hot down sheltering this present happiness as if it were a round, warm egg. Clouds have erased the peaks beyond the harbor, and I feel the boat that formed my bed tugging at its lines...
Non-Transferable

The instant I pull into the gas station, he starts screaming, starts pummeling the back of my seat with his gray and green Velcro sneakers....
Afterglow

By morning, feathers had settled lightly in the corners of the bathroom. They swept up into the air, though, as I moved past. Down, up and down. One brushed the nape of my neck as I stepped from the shower, and clamped there to damp skin. A torn comforter; a small domestic catastrophe....
Little Traveling Altars

I am calling my current situation 'vow of poverty' because that sounds much nobler than 'slumming' or 'lazy.' Vow of poverty helps me remember that the reason I will eat chickpeas for dinner for the next three nights is because there is a larger goal at hand....
Cooking for Grandpa

Grandpa slumps on the three-legged stool, his clouded brown eyes intent on me as I reach into a cabinet drawer to scoop flour for dredging pieces of chicken soaking in a bowl of buttermilk....
Afghan Roses

In Massoud's Circle, weathered plastic shopping bags are captured by the thorns of Afghan roses. Armored vehicles crisscross in formation. Liberators with their guns pointed bully civilian cars to halt. My convoy breezes by, failing to free the bags from their thorny prison....
Living With Ian

My brother Ian and I live in the Pacific Northwest. We have a small brick house with wooden floors and a wall of French windows, letting in plenty of light....
Ripple (repeat)

On a rusted railroad bridge overlooking Ohio's Rocky River, I stand with my father beneath an ocean blue sky and listen to the water's murmur. My father removes his glasses and points to a large rock beside the lower bank...
The Day to Day

Sifting the flour. Squeezing the lever once. And then waiting. For a moment, it is winter again. I take my finger and make snow angels in the little blue bowl.
Wake Up

I cannot take my children hiking without them mentioning babcia and dziadek and how they like to hike. Did you know they are going to take me camping one day? they say. Our children have seen their grandmother for the last time although she is still alive in a living room in Queens.