The Cloister and the Cradle
2007. I’m teaching at Stella Maris, a small girls’ Catholic high school in Queens. Many of my colleagues are nuns.
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The Lifecycle of Butterflies
In Michoacán, the migrating mariposas appear with November, as if trailing the marigolds trucked in for Day of the Dead. They come by the fragile millions…
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Why I Didn’t See the David (and other methodologies of heartbreak)
When I was twenty and graduating college, my grandmother gave me the kind of balls-out crazy gift-of-a-lifetime that characterized her gift-giving oeuvre.
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In the Form of Birds
The summer my father died I bought a book on Southwestern birds. It was he who had given me my first feeder on my 8th birthday…
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Lilac Stitches
I met my future stepmother in a Leningrad subway when I was eight. Luda was a twenty-year-old transplant from a small Ukrainian town…
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