When my mom was a little girl, she would play outside in the winter until her cheeks were numb and her fingers ached inside her gloves. She would come back into the house, weeping from the pins and needles that ran through her fingers. Elizabeth, the maid/babysitter who worked for my mom’s family for [...]

As most people who read this blog know, the apartment I live in belonged to my grandparents long before I was born. I first came here when I was just three months old and came to visit at least once a year until 2002, when I moved in for good. You’d think after [...]

It’s the day after Christmas and I’m snuggled down in bed, enjoying my parents’ wifi signal, the blustery weather and the fact that there isn’t a thing I have to do today. Nearly a week ago Scott tagged me to participate in a meme but I’ve been running all over Portland getting ready for [...]

I was tagged many moons ago to do a Christmas meme (okay, so it was actually only two weeks ago). Since I’m feeling particularly low on creative juices and I don’t feel like delving into the depths of my soul to talk about the unspecified anxiety I’ve been feeling over the last few days, [...]

When I was eight years old, smack in the middle of the third grade, my family moved from Eagle Rock, CA (just next door to Pasadena) to Portland, OR.  My parents decided to move in the middle of the year in part because my mom read somewhere that kids who transition into new schools in [...]

In the mid-1980’s, when my parents were looking for places to move in order to get our family out of Los Angeles, my mom had a dream. She dreamed that we were living someplace with views of a beautiful mountain. When she came to Portland for the first time, she was struck the [...]

This afternoon my mom and I started talking about a Safeway that was near my high school in Portland, that no longer exists.  It was poorly lit and slightly dirty.  The parking lot drains were always clogged with fallen leaves, creating lakes across the white lines.  There was frequently a person of dubious residency sleeping [...]

Monday afternoon I stood at my dining room table, flipping through a splayed out copy of the New York Times, when an obituary caught my eye and made me lean in to better read it. It reported that a ninety-eight year old woman named Ernestine Gilbreth Carey had died. My heart squeezed in [...]

On election day in 1988, I was sitting in my fourth grade classroom focused on a math worksheet, when I heard clicking noises come down the hallway. I looked and saw my mom walking down the hallway with our dog Toasty on a leash. She had come to take me out of class [...]

I have always been a sucker for a picnic, packed neatly into a basket, with sliverware neatly slotted into elastic holders attached to the lid, cloth napkins tucked carefully around the cheese and sausage.  Not that I’ve really ever had any picnics like that, but still.  When I was a kid, I so romanticized the [...]