Autumn Blaze Maple October is warmer than usual. All weekend, social media friends post pictures of high school homecoming dances. Their daughters wear short tubes of colorful fabric held in place with hip bones and spaghetti straps. The homecomings I remember were chilly. The popular girls wore Irish knit sweaters that swung like thigh-length hoop…
An hour and a half north of Bishop, up a road with a view of Death Valley; that’s where to find the ancient bristlecone forest, and when I say ancient, first, there are trees in those woods who—who? That? Who—trees who are two to three thousand years old, who fully remember who they’ve always been. They…
For as long as I can remember, my mother wanted to get back home. She delighted in many things (Elvis Presley, migrating birds, black raspberry ice cream, figures of women and birds sculpted from stone) but for eighty of the eighty-three years she walked this earth, my mother was best defined by her desire to…
New York City is seventy degrees and sunny in late October, and on a bench outside the MET Cloisters Museum, my friend Sarah and I celebrate with a picnic. We sip coconut water, sop up hummus with pita, and savor the last dregs of summer. After a whole day in the museum, we cut through…
When I was seven years old, my parents noticed I had perfect pitch and could play almost anything by ear, so they started me on piano lessons. But I had trouble with my fingers: they were somehow never independent and my struggles to keep from bending two at a time made my wrists tighten. I…
“Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation …” —Gravesite of President John F. Kennedy (1917–1963), Arlington National Cemetery (reinterment 1967), Quoting JFK’s Inaugural Address (1961) “The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou heareth the sound thereof,…
1. Lavabo y Espejo, by Antonio López García, is a painting of a bathroom sink and mirror. The sink, fused to the wall, floats. Its shadow grows west. The mirror above waits, empty, reflecting no person, only the square tiles of the opposite wall. On a transparent shelf between sink and mirror sit tools meant for…
If there’s one thing you learn working on a carnival, it’s how to be invisible. Despite all that bling and zip and wow, a carny’s goal is to straddle the distance between spectacle and crowd: to entice people toward the ticket booth, then slip into the background. In my family, it’s a long-standing tradition. Tricksters…
The two-lane highway clings to the lakeshore, passes through a rocky tunnel, and climbs Spooner Pass. I listen to music, telling myself my recent symptoms mean nothing, even as I feel a whoosh of vertigo. It’s late September, and the aspens are just starting to change—light green against the Sierra blue sky. It’s a beautiful…
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