You can read my latest piece for Edible Austin, an essay about walking the Camino de Santiago and meeting people from all over the world across the dinner table, here. It includes a recipe for our favorite Spanish tortilla.
July 13, 2015
Month: July 2015
These Things Far South (2)
I don’t know any of them, the writers who show up early Sunday morning for a day of practice around the folding tables of the Writing Barn. They are drafting picture books and novels, dissertations and short stories. All morning the keyboards rattle gently and occasionally the doors squeal to shatter the silence. We stay at it, lunch under ceiling fans on the porch, return. Outside, I walk a circle down limestone gravel paths, under live oaks hung with chandeliers, past funky chairs. Once more Austin steps forward to greet me before sending me back into the world.
July 12, 2015
These Things Far South
On Saturday night we sat in folding chairs beneath the trees while Strings Attached adapted the Beatles to South Austin. A little Texas Swing. A bit of Latin. A full complement of voice and instrument and heart, so much heart. We gathered in the front yard, all around us camp chairs and bug spray and tank tops, regulars settling in and kicking off their sandals. A woman in a head wrap offered massages on a portable table. People danced in the margins in their long skirts. Once there was a way / to get back homeward, they sang. Once their was a way / to get back home. Everything scruffy and overgrown, the barefoot child swept up into so many arms. This is a place I once knew. This is where Austin went when we weren’t looking.
July 11, 2015
You Could Journey Here Too
Wherever you look, another pathway inviting your feet, another sidewalk, cracked or not, another street to cross after double checking both ways. Three miles one direction, three miles the other. Up the steep hill toward Travis Heights, how the slope slows you, reminds you your legs were once stronger. Pride of Barbados a shock of brightness. On the other side of the street, a girl who once sat for your cat doesn’t notice you. Waiting for the beep. Choosing the shade. A suit of armor painted red in a backyard. A giant wooden chicken by the front door. Shrimp plant. Old marquee. Drifting scent of pizza. The curly-haired cyclist with the basket on her bike passes you both ways. Does she ride this street all day? Let me know.
July 6, 2015
Ode to the Half-written Letter
How you return to it and find the life you were living then — two weeks, two months, two years ago. A time between losses, you said, and within minutes your family erupted and loss of a different kind came at you. And here you are. It is 6am. The week is beginning, a week in which you have so much to do. Then pen you use is the same, the notebook peeled back to reveal more blank pages to fill. What was it you intended to say?
July 6, 2015
Twilight On the Boardwalk
It’s one of the gifts of summer: late strolls after dinner, the air still warm but not seething with heat, the smattering of joggers and unicycle riders and Latino families with children leaning to look for fish in the water. It stays light far past when we expect it to, and downtown looks impressive, shiny and aglow. We live here. So often we complain: the traffic, the prices, the scruffy city we fell in love with transformed into something else. But didn’t we fall for each other when we both lived in tiny apartments and mouthed off about simplicity, paring down, though for a decade we have had 2200 square feet and squabbles over the lawn? We can’t spend forever on the sagging deck of a coffeehouse listening to Guy Forsyth strum his guitar. Sometimes we turn and are struck anew with delight for our midlife selves dressed in the better clothes that midlife allows. And so our city too, offering a different kind of impressive while we saunter along, the day mostly behind us, rail lights illuminating the way toward home.
July 5, 2015
