The day I heard he was leaving I was shocked. My eldest daughter’s husband of fifteen years, a forty-eight-year-old who sports a reddish beard and a ball cap, and a shiny pickup truck. Father to their only child. I had encouraged the purchase of the truck, supporting this man’s dream, when my daughter had demurred. It turned out the truck was useful.

I
March 2020

It’s raining. The darkness of the day accentuates the uncertainty of the times as I sit at my kitchen table. A steady drip keeps time with my heartbeats. We are in Pandemic Time, a seemingly vast, uncharted, unlimited pause.

In front of me are the remains of two Zoom birthday party celebrations this week: hats, made of

The two men could not have been more different. One kept a picture of Jesus over his bed, the other a framed photograph of a naked woman in his living room. Both lived in cheap quarters along South Tacoma Way, in the years C-130s routinely flew low on their approach to the McCord Air Base. Vietnam was winding down. Noise from the planes rattled windows and caused conversations at the law school, where they were both

It is summer. Hummingbirds flit from potted flowers to backyard flowering blackberries that form a hedgerow between neighbors, full of sweetness that will surely follow. We imagine pies, we imagine jam, we imagine fruit in the freezer.

nside the white mini bus. Twelve seats, all facing Dakar’s cacophony of human wanderings, roadside. Lemons, oranges, bananas. Cloth dolls and fabric passport-purses balanced in flat baskets on heads of moving women swathed in vibrant prints. Upholstered sofas wrapped in plastic for outside sales. Pens of goats awaiting slaughter—Mrs. Camara’s dinner. Fathers, mothers,

I am in the midst of a love affair with Montana. I didn’t see it coming, as so often is the case with middle-agers. We drift into these close-to-the-heart relationships and, somewhere along the way, knee deep in delight and longing, we consider radical thoughts