It seems that the pros and cons of relationships, or individuals, have in the end little influence on my decisions, which spring usually from a hidden pocket of my intuition—hidden, even from me, as well as from the lovers or would-be lovers or husbands who encounter my will.
Blog Posts about My Family
Icebox to Refrigerator
When I was growing up in Kentucky, an enormous wooden box with chrome handles on its many doors crouched in the back pantry, a dark room that I felt was not really safe. Why? Probably just the darkness, the many closed cupboards, and the icebox, which I didn’t know how to name.
Our Mother’s Douche Bag
…its threat lingers, as we know today when girls starve or bloat themselves, cut their arms, or sacrifice their skins to tattoos: the old horror of the natural female body, reappearing like some monster from the deep, in every generation.
Ten Favorites: On To The Next
Now that my newest book, Mending: New and Selected Short Stories is reaching its readers, I find myself in a rather delightful quandary.
The Last Rose of Summer
These sisters, my father remembered, always sang and accompanied themselves on the piano at this time of year in a duet to the dying of summer, called “The Last Rose of Summer”
The Blue and White Bandana
“Look at the embroidery,” she said, spreading out the bandana. Dense, tiny silk flowers in red, gold, purple and blue covered every inch.
“On the other side, too.” She turned it over; miraculously, it seemed to me, the wrong side of the bandana was also completely covered with tiny flowers. I’d been sewing letters on a sampler, much against my will, and I knew how messy the back side of anything embroidered usually looked.
My Mother’s Eyes
When I became aware of her as my mother (I was her third child), she was a tiny blond woman, almost doll-like, formed by the conventions of upper class marriage. I almost never saw her without make-up, her hair set in careful blond curls, wearing a powerful girdle, a suit and carrying a purse; she seemed always to be armed for a distant battle.
Knife, Dagger, Poignard
It glittered obscurely in the back of the curio cabinet my grandmother kept in her dark little house in Richmond, Virginia, the house where she’d raised six daughters and a son. On the walls there were snapshots of all those golden-haired girls, and the one dark-haired boy, as well as their equally fair children and grandchildren, but I don’t remember them. Familiar icons, alike in all houses, they were not interesting; but the curio cabinet, and its contents-which only my grandmother touched-alerted me instantly to the electric presence of stories.
Growing Up Without Africa
It has taken me a long time to realize how little I knew about the women who raised me.