Posts Tagged ‘home’
A Blue House in a Red State
September 11, 2019
Do we draw on an underlying aquifer of values when we choose where we will live?
Read MoreYehuda Amichai: My One Poet
June 18, 2018
If I could have only one poet, I’d choose Yehuda Amichai. He’s the poet of the city where I came to life in my twenties: Jerusalem is a port city on the shore of eternity…. Jerusalem is the Venice of God. Jerusalem stone is the only stone that can feel pain. It has a…
Read MoreMother’s House
May 29, 2018
Mother’s house is not a house. Mother’s house is not a cave. Mother’s house is not a sacred text. Mother’s house is not an oven. Mother’s house is not a medicine cabinet. Mother’s house is not a song. Mother’s house is not a tree. Mother’s house is not an ocean. Mother’s house is not a…
Read MoreThe Ghosts of Home
November 30, 2016
When I visit my family in northern Minnesota, I find myself on the same roads I’ve known—back and forth—since I was a child. Often I ride with others because I can’t orient, even in my small town and the outskirts made of barely-there townships and roads that veer only toward themselves. I think of small…
Read MoreThe Prophet of Uninterrupted Complaint
May 23, 2016
I am grateful for deadlines, even when I have little time, or only brief windows of it, which I often manage to fill with reading the Internet. I know my cannons will fire, because they must, but lately I’ve experienced a sort of brain-fatigue, or perhaps it’s peace (I don’t really know the difference), that’s…
Read MoreThe Abandoned, Broken, and Burned
March 7, 2016
By the time you read this, inshallah, we will have the new dishwasher purchased and installed in our kitchen. I’m not holding my breath. It’s been this long, so it is easy to envision a horizon of expectations that continues to recede into the distance a few more weeks or months. “Oh, come on,” my…
Read MoreDrive-By Memory
February 17, 2016
My first memory takes place in Lakewood, CA, a small suburb south of Los Angeles. Lakewood, the nation’s first planned community, also happens to be the subject of D. J. Waldie’s Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir. “In a suburb that is not exactly middle class,” Waldie writes at the beginning of the book, “the necessary…
Read MorePrecious Things Come from Staying
December 28, 2015
Joan Didion’s family, she says, are a tribe of leavers. In her 2004 book Where I Was From, she begins with her great-great-great-great-grandmother and traces a family history lined with people who, she says, are always leaving, always pushing west. “They tended to accommodate any means in pursuit of an uncertain end,” she says, unsparingly.…
Read MoreThe Odyssey: Homer’s Retort to Current U.S. Policy
November 5, 2015
Are you as numb to news of war as I am? We the American public are so used to hearing that our country is acting militarily in yet another place on the globe that we don’t even question whether we should be arming the Saudi Arabian forces in Yemen or “supporting” Syrian so-called moderate rebels.…
Read MoreWhere’s the Guilt?
August 24, 2015
I’ve had the experience of dealing with renters from time to time, though more in the capacity of property manager than as landlord. It has been one of the ugliest, most unpleasant things a person can go through in business.
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