Photo: My dad playing guitar, sitting next to my brother. That’s me on the right. My father is a singer-songwriter. When I was little, he toured with a songwriters’ group I have since forgotten the name of. Folk singers, I think. Well, it was the ’70s, so that’s a good guess. Back then, we lived in a two-story, concrete block house with wooden floors and walls, and an iron-railed balcony perched atop the downstairs porch. Mom never would let us…
I’m on my way home from a spontaneous road trip, embarked upon last week due to an itchy restlessness I couldn’t shake. I haven’t been on one of these in a while. The last one took me to the very same place I ended up in this time, along a very similar route, almost exactly one year ago.I tell people I’m a free spirit, but maybe traveling this journey twice in two years is the beginning of a routine, or…
Growing up, I must’ve had the strongest female role models of any woman alive, except maybe my sister, who was blessed with the same set. Nanny, our paternal grandmother, lost her first husband to Nazi gunners during World War II, her eldest daughter at a tender age to a tragic accident, and her second husband to drink. She developed rheumatoid arthritis in her late thirties, the most severe case her specialists had seen at the time, and eventually died due…