The summer that my girls were just shy of four and one, my baby Abby asserted her independence early. We were on a week-long vacation at the beach, and the new world spread before her could not be explored from the confines of my lap. And so, in the forceful way of a not-yet-walking infant,…

An apartment. Just my dad and me. Christmas on a budget. Kitchen big enough for one. First steps, first words, many firsts I don’t remember. A house. A little one. Only one bedroom and filled to the brim with junk. Mom’s stuff, sister’s stuff, brother’s stuff, my stuff. Mostly Mom’s enormous collection of Precious Moments…

“I don’t understand why you want to go to a creative writing program,” my stepfather said gloomily. It was the late 1980s and I would have been twenty. We were standing together at the mantelpiece in the living room of the family home in County Wicklow, Ireland, a house that had its own name: Newcastle…

Excerpt from Smoke the Clouds & Drink the Moon My mother, at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach, befriending a homeless band of liquored-up musicians on a summer day both haunts and delights me. It is 1995: Tom Hanks coins the phrase from Apollo 13: Houston, we have a problem. The Soup Nazi from Seinfeld makes his…

The old city had been tough place to live in. There was no electricity. No roads. No drainage system. There was no food except for what the poor fishermen could get from the salty seas and the eventual canned delicacy from distant lands: peas, apricots, corn grains. There was no sweet water, it all had…

I can’t quite bring myself to pull back from the steam that kisses my neck and face aggressively every time I lift my hand. It’s getting more and more suffocating the longer the iron has a chance to heat up, but it’s slow going this afternoon. Something about the faded green party dress hissing in…

I scribble the directions on a sheet of lined paper. Most of the turns I know, since I regularly drive the first two-thirds of the way to the store. Nevertheless, I’m nervous. If I’m driving some place new, I usually take my husband Richard along. He’s gone today, so I’m making the drive alone. Down…

Dates are important to doctors. Timelines, records, charts, files. Every time I go to a hospital appointment, all my information is there waiting for me, which is pretty much one of the only reliable things I’ve experienced in a hospital. Last time, the receptionist was searching through her pile of files for mine, only to…