Amharic language
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Feed The Soul
The good cooking that I was raised on is an art, and I was taught by the best. At Galen and Deanna’s table, good food was a given. Prepared with love, presented as an event, even when money was tight (always), and the house needed cleaning and repair (always), we had candles lit for supper,…
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I Alone Own This Body
The True Feminine “I am not sugar and spice and everything nice. I am art. I am a story. I am a church bell, gonging out wrongs and rights and normal nights. I was baby. I am child. I will be mother. I don’t mind being considered beautiful, I do not allow that to be…
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“Rose & Dine” at The Liberty Rose
The Liberty Rose Bed & Breakfast, one mile from beautiful Colonial Williamsburg, in this historic Virginia corridor, is a charming peaceful place to visit. The highlight for me, when I am lucky enough to spend any time there, are the gardens that cover an acre of wooded land. Secret places to sit, read, meditate, write, flowering…
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Look In Her Eyes
Her eyes are the deep brown of the Ethiopian coffee that runs through her veins with all the strength and sustenance that coffee is for that country. Deep wells of love and pain, sass and longing and empathy, with the unconscious knowledge of centuries of custom and tradition. She is firmly tied to those villages,…
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Be a Star (To Matthew)
….From where you are To where I am now Is its own galaxy Be a star And fall down somewhere next to me…. Pretty Things by Rufus Wainwright You were afraid of us when we met you. I was newly off to college when my father was your professor. You were a student who played the…
Bird, California, children, Family, food, grief, HIV, home, love, ocean, Pacific, photography, Piano, Point Reyes, teacher -
The Relay
I hope I don’t throw up. I’m afraid I’m going to throw up. I think I’m going to throw up. I wish I could just throw up. It’s hot, and I’m not used to hot runs yet in this spring, chilly and damp until today, and I can’t take off any more clothes. This road,…
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Safe Passage
I had a front row seat when they began to dismember her. Chunk by chunk, they dissected her and spread her out and scrutinized her. They scooped and sawed and chipped at her until there was nothing left inside; until eventually the wire she was made to walk became so narrow, tight, and sharp, no…
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A Death In The Family
On the last day of August my church died. This was the place where I grew up beside my parents and grandparents, my sisters and brother. Beside great-aunts and -uncles who watched me misbehave and gently corrected me, surrounding me with love in our family pew. And when I was young, church was a hushed mystical…
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Big Weather
I’m washing dishes in the kitchen in July, and sweating. Brahms’ 3rd Symphony is in the speakers, and while a nice distraction, I pause to wipe the drop of sweat off my eyebrow with the back of my arm, and my mind isn’t on the music. My thick humid days roll on and over to…
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The Unfriending
I’ve been unfriended. Not in an offhand virtual click of a button way, the result of a web-based housecleaning that goes unnoticed for weeks, but in a bloody cut it out with a knife never speak to me again unfriending. Oh, I brought it on, I fully admit that, and I deserved his anger at the moment of…
Truth and Malbec 