The mud-colored water of Silver Creek — The Creek, though we pronounced it “crick” — would turn your tightie-whities red, the color of Arizona red rocks, the color of pueblo clay. Stains that would never remove. And so you’d score points with your mother if you took them off and left them somewhere else while […]
In elementary school, time was marked by the celebration of the seasons through the constant production of writing and artwork. You couldn’t esape the fact that it was autumn (falling leaves, chestnuts) or winter (icicles and snow—even though we rarely saw these) because they were all over the classroom wall. And then you […]
Stella visited an island and went kayaking on the sea.
She saw a white heron hiding in the trees
And a sunken house with many seabirds.
The water was shallow and matted with sea grass.
A sea hare lived in the water.
He inked Stella’s hands.
A sea urchin crawled across her palm.
She kayaked into the mangrove swamps
and met a small […]
Who wants Baileys?
As a child, I hated working in the garden. Gardening in those days meant pulling up weeds and chucking rocks from my parents’ ever-increasing vegetable patch in the back yard of our home, which was situated on a bench at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains in northern Utah. This bench had long ago been […]