Coming Home

My earliest, specific memory of coming home is the drive back from the airport after my family and I went on a summer trip to California when I was 9 years old. I hated California. Strange, I know. (I live there now. I don’t hate it.) We visited my sister in San Francisco, and San Francisco was nice enough…

Keep Walking

When I lived in the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland in 1998, subsisting on the California minimum wage I earned from a newspaper internship, I would go out walking most evenings. Today, the neighborhood itself is thriving, but then it was an uninviting area after dusk. The brightest late-night venue…

A sudden change in pressure

The hard part was the moment after it was all done.

I was moving across the country, with no job or apartment lined up or faintest notion what my life would be like. And I had a dog, a 50 lb., barely post-adolescent dog accustomed to spending more time…

They Only Come Out at Night

I have gone at dusk and stood in the round at road’s end, where trees give way to open sky. And, eyes upward, I’ve trailed the flitting and the fleeting of one bat, and another, and another, dark against the still-lit sky, looping, circling, feasting. And my feet have followed…