South Padre is everything you’d expect from a touristy beach town. Lots of brightly colored souvior shops with kitschy items that both kids loved, tiny bathing suits, funny (and risqué) T-shirt’s, and giant fish complete neon and flashing lights.
All tagged memory
Cooking from Memory
There are things that remind me, tugging me into the past, the scent of homemade bread and oatmeal cookies, the taste of sun ripened tomatoes still hot from the summer garden.
Sunset
To me, it was just a sunset, not a particularly pretty one, nothing spectacular, just day slowly moving into night. But to him it was photograph worthy, to be oohed and aahed over, to be recorded and remembered as being spectacular.
Birdhouses
I watch my mother painting birdhouses. These are not the simple, made in your garage or woodshop variety.
Grasshopper
Several feet away on the seawall, in the path of the oncoming tide, sat a bright green grasshopper
Evergreen
A false evergreen, plastic fake, colored lights popping in and out of existence. The ornaments of my childhood caught, exposed
Revoke My Adult Card
There are days when I feel like my adult card should be revoked.Example? Last Saturday I got a speeding ticket and my tire exploded.
The Last Time
The ship is a floating city. It's cliché but how else to describe the huge, the monstrous gray building suspended on the water?
Giant Dead Bird
This is the first year that I've been the primary cook for one of the largest meals of the year
South
But in South Carolina the plants were neon, the color deep, as if a cut leaf could be used as a marker, as if their pigment might transfer easily to paper.
Thoughts For My Children
The best parts of me, the worthwhile bits, anything that's good comes from them.
Field at Dusk
I stand at the edge of the field, toes curled in stained tennis shoes, nails bitten to the quick.
On My Mother's Birthday
My mother is a pair of hands first; a blurred figure, a face I tilt my neck back to see. The flash of a smile, a pair of arms that reach around me and lift.
Birth
It’s hard to find a place to start, a moment in which to pinpoint the change; the feeling of going from pregnant me to mother, the moment in which my son went from being a part of me to being a person in his own right.
Drivers Ed
I waited for an opening, blinker on, foot easing down on the gas. I took the first opportunity and the speedometer began to climb.
Dead Fish
My three year old brother explored the beach, armed with his red plastic pail and a little yellow shovel: the tools of all children taken to the seashore for a day.