San Francisco Chronicle Magazine

It started with June Chatterton, the oldest person I knew. She lived across the street from our house with her daughter’s family. Their home was full of antiques and Mrs. Chatterton gave me my first—a miniature hobnail blue glass perfume bottle, one small enough to hold in my eight-year old fist. Something about its age caught my imagination—the smoothly worn chip on its rim, the inexplicable word “Roll” on its front and the little hobs along its sides. That’s when I knew I would always love old things. And it seemed natural to me even then, at eight-years old, to begin collecting them.

(more…)

Originally published on Salon.com
Reprinted in Left Coast Writers Anthology, Hot Flashes: Sexy Little Stories and Poems
Included in Travelers’ Tales The Best Women’s Travel Writing 2005, due April 2005

“I’ve been watching you all week,” he said. “You have a nice smile.” And then, inexplicably, “You are a good wife and mother.”

He was a waiter at Aggie Grey’s Hotel in Samoa and I was on my last day in the country, lying by the pool, trying not to think about leaving this paradise. He had been standing in the sun’s heat for forty-five minutes, holding his tray and trying to convince me to meet him in my hotel room.

(more…)

San Francisco Examiner Magazine

Ingredients:

butter
egg noodles
rice
chicken broth
slivered almonds
chopped dates

Preparation:

Melt the butter in the bottom of a heavy stock pot until it foams. Use at least a whole cube of butter for every three cups of rice. Even if you cook only one cup of rice, still use the whole cube. Melt the butter into a golden foam.

I don’t even consider margarine. It would be a disaster. I hide the amount of butter I use if my children are around. But if it’s others in my family—my parents, my sister or sister in law, my aunt—I melt the cubes with zeal, sometimes three for a big family dinner. They’re pretty in the pot, the sharp edges slowly rounding with the heat, the fragrance rich with promise.

(more…)

Catalyst Magazine

from Meeting Ella Peacock, Again

After keeping myself busy in her quiet house for my own long empty days, I was gaining a better understanding of her determination to do her “full-time job of looking” at the desert mountains as a diversion from her isolation. Perhaps it was that loneliness that encouraged her amazing capacity for work in Sanpete County where she painted in her car both during the hot summers and white winters. But I was beginning to see that she wasn’t really painting for the love of it alone. She was also working so hard from a long tradition of duty and from a genuine need to survive. I only then realized the quiet power in her paintings was not entirely a reflection of her unassuming personality; it replicated her inner solitude as well.

As I sat in her kitchen rereading her letters and my transcriptions of our conversations, I noticed how many times she had told me she didn’t think she would “make it through another winter,” how many times she asked me if I thought she “should move back east” again and how frequently she said she was “finished” with this life. I noticed how often she talked about money in her letters to Bailey, how fearful she was of depleting her savings account. Once she told him she had recently sold five paintings and said she was proud she was able to build her savings—and in a subsequent letter asked if he thought she had been boastful. It was probably in this silent kitchen she wrote those letters. Perhaps it wasn’t the cold of the winters as much as the quiet emptiness of the night she dreaded.