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Behind Closed Doors
October is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, but it’s also Breast Cancer Awareness Month, Pit Bull Awareness Month, National Pharmacy Month, Pastor Appreciation Month, and Halloween, among other national observances. You can see how easy it is to forget or to overlook something that is, in fact, an epidemic right under our noses. But before your eyes roll back in your head or slip away to another blog post, let me take it from the general, the theoretical, to the personal. Domestic violence – when someone in the household hurts or harms another – ranges from a parent hurting a child, an adult abusing an elderly family member, a sibling bullying…
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Birthrights and Wrongs
I’m heading south and east this week to dig into some family history, the in-person research I can do only in person in Alabama. I’ll be staying in Jasper, with forays into Birmingham and down to Alexander City and Hackneyville. Part of the research will be digging into libraries and part will be driving around to see the environs where my forebears were slaveholders. I’ve found what I could find on Ancestry.com and at my local library; I have looked through old photo albums (hence the photo of Ole Mary washing clothes, from about 1915; it’s very possible she was a former slave). I have purchased deed-mapping software and found information…
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Hitting the Road
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Fill Your Paper…
Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart. –William Wordsworth When I sit to write my blog, I am like the slot machine that comes up with one lemon, one X and one banana peel. It takes a few pulls to get gold. As I sat late this Sunday evening to write the elusive *something* I wanted to write, I saw the clipped-out graphic with those words from the aptly named Wordsworth. So, to follow my own instructions, here is what is breathing in my heart. I want to write beautiful, wrenching things that leave clawmarks as I drag them into light. I want to describe the color of…
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Home at the Edge of the World: Alameda Poet Laureate Inaugural Poem
Home at the Edge of the World Alameda Poet Laureate Inaugural Poem There are houses down your shaded streets – beneath your oaks, your ginkos, your avenues of palm – Leaded in glass, shingled in fish-scale, spangled with gingerbread, Victorian ladies tarted up for Carnival, their history and lore curving like a staircase into view. Gentlemen strolled in spats, ladies swung their parasols, bay breezes curling with fog and the clank of halyards, snapping flags. Water, at every turn, glittering to shore, to ship, to ankles and toes. Neptune would have been pleased to see his name emblazoned, to hear the calliope, the splash and crank, the punch of tickets.…
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How is This Possible? Coincidences and Other Disasters
I spend a lot of my time howling the cosmic yawp into the blue beyond. It looks, to mortal eyes, like I’m making lunch and beating a deadline and running errands and remembering to put out the trash cans. But I assure you, a goodly portion of every day is given over to caterwauling (mostly in my inside voice but not always) on the WHY of everyday living. The WHY of how did we get here? The WHY of how can X be happening? I’m old enough to know better. I am hitting that midpoint in life. I have successfully raised 4.9 kids (just 1 year left on #5). We…
