What Photos Show–and What They Don’t

When people look at my childhood photos, the general reaction is, “Wow! You haven’t changed a bit.” I’m always the tall chubby one with dark brown hair, often doing something dramatic such as dancing on the table at the restaurant where my grandmother was a short-order cook or balancing stuff on my head. Some things haven’t… Continue reading What Photos Show–and What They Don’t

The Peaceable Pursuit of Gardening

It started small, with some onion sets and a few tomato plants, back in 1987, the year we moved into our first house in a new development 35 miles west of Chicago. By the time we moved back into the city about four years later, the space my ex lovingly

We Are Family

We were born three months and one week and sixty-five miles apart, my cousin Cindy and I. We married 361 days apart. And yet, we have always been different. Cindy’s father–one of my mother’s younger brothers–and his family moved to the South