A walk through my neighborhood: an essay and photo journal.I’ll be honest. I intimately know the flowers in my neighborhood, but hardly any faces. When I heard our word for this month was Neighbor I said, “Oh crap. All I know about neighbors is that good fences make good ones!” But as I began journaling…
“Bowl is life.” The sign above the door boasts explosive clip art of a bowling ball striking pins over Ariel Bold font. You push the metal bar on the door and step into a rush of hot, stale air, the air of the alleys. Incessant rolls of thunder and subsequent crashes on repeat. Marge at…
In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the answer to the question ‘Who is my neighbor?’ is ‘Everyone.’ I appreciate this story because it opens up the world to boundless love regardless of race, class, religion. But, while they’re not mutually exclusive, there’s no substitute for truly knowing the people who physically live around you,…
I plop down at my post. A little corner on the edge of the sandbox. My legs awkwardly dangle over the side, and I try to ignore what might be living in there as my daughter sucks on the end of a broken shovel. I take a gulp of my now lukewarm coffee and, out…
I moved into our home ten years ago this month, the year our tiny house on the corner of our block turned 100. Kyle and I were newlyweds with grateful hearts for our home in a neighborhood we knew to be ideal for us: in the heart of our beloved city, Seattle, with all of…
If there’s something my Italian heritage has taught me, it’s that food brings people together. Not just to eat it. Making pasta is a family assembly line, taking an entire day of talking and drinking wine while hands busily fold and seal tortellini. You make lots and you invite the neighbors. Food is tradition and hospitality, love and gift, shared enterprise and social do.
Pruning leads to growth. It’s so counter-intuitive, but the power of this truth continues to astonish me. I see it in the lacecap verbera twisted through the arbor lattice. I pruned it a year and a half ago and now it’s fuller than I could have imagined. I see it in the apple tree buds, twice…
We had always lived in the city, but after my husband, Bryan, and I brought home two babies to our tiny third-floor condo next to a 7-11—from which we witnessed many dangerous liaisons of both the narcotic and carnal variety, heard delivery trucks arrive next door to unload pallets of Mountain Dew and Doritos at…
By trade I am a forager of flowers. I scavenge, buy, and grow them so I can fashion them into designs. Sometimes I feel as though I breathe, sleep, and live amidst flowers. I have grown right along side them in a metaphysical garden of sorts, and I feel as though my budding days are…
My heart an empty stained old thing It bends within its cage Withering whistling whip-stilled and struggling Rages and bursts again. Be careful with that It’s an emblem, you see Once broken it takes quite an army To push on the sand till it’s swallowed by clams And pearlized by their tongues in their…
For a week straight my son is fixated on the vacuum, a driven, crazed sort of obsession that borders on the insane. He says, “Bacoon,” and makes a whooshing noise with his little baby lips and points furiously toward the basement stairs. “Do you want to see the vacuum?” “Yes,” he says in a way that means, Yes! Why are we wasting our time with this wooden tricycle and PVC-free blocks? Bring me to that dust-covered vacuum! But the moment we reach the concrete floor of the basement, the second that two-foot purplish canister comes into view, my brave toddler…
I.Can’t. Breathe. “It’s all going to be okay,” I tell myself as I try to inhale, barely able to squeeze in enough air to fill my lungs. 1…2…3… I try again. Straining, I can see blackness creeping into my periphery and still, nothing. “We’ve been here before,” I say to myself, “and we’ve always gotten…
Kindred 