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The Lifecycle of Butterflies
While in English butterfly has etymologists stumped, the ancient Greek word is psyche, the same as soul and breath. In Spanish, the word is mariposa, which is theoretically derived from the phrase “Maria, posa,” or “Mary, alight.” But in the days of my butterfly safaris through timothy and alfalfa it did not occur to me to reflect upon the “thread of vital light,” upon mortality, even as I imposed…
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On Nativity
According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus was born while his parents were traveling to Bethlehem to register, as required by law, with the census. Fast forward 2,010 Decembers— giving or taking a few for the ecclesiastical debate and/or shoddy recordkeeping around the dawn of the common era—to the advent of my own son’s nativity. He wasn’t born in a Bethlehem barn beneath a great star but in Michoacán’s Star Médica…
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The Little Giant Sequoia
For my birthday this year, my five-year-old son presented me with a sequoia seedling just four inches high. Sequoia as in, Sequoiadendron giganteum—the Sierra redwood that, given a couple millennia, can grow to be one of the largest living organisms on the planet. It came, this fragile sprout of evergreen, in a clear plastic tube emblazoned with assurances that this tree could and would GROW ANYWHERE!
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Fire Ants
In those first months living in El Salvador, had I walked down a village street and seen young men leaning against gaping doorframes, their eyes steady upon me, I would have read the wrong story. Then, I could barely speak, let alone interpret what signs I might have seen: a flash of black ink on skin; aerosol piss scrawled across cinder block walls. I might have misremembered that those…
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Coatepeque Nightswimming
When I’m out of words, out of context (as I was so often in Salvador), my memory turns visceral: I remember the oozing feel of warm bottom sludge. I remember the way my body glowed an eerie white in the moonlight, the stark contrast of my skin against greased black water, a shard of bone upon obsidian. I remember how hard my heart beat.
Her award-winning nonfiction spans the essay, longform, oral history, and auto/biographical forms.
She teaches writing at the University of Michigan.