Carne Santificata
I am happy in this village above the sea, this Anacapri, where my husband and I, retired and tending our bucket list, have come to write and escape the dead of another Idaho winter. It is spring here, first flowers blooming, too early in the season for most tourists. The ritual evening passeggiata brings out…
On Fire: Scenes from the Climate Crisis
Late summer light comes to Idaho’s Clearwater Canyon in a wash of color so sweet it’s palatable: butterscotch and toffee, caramel and honey. It is as though the high fields of wheat, the darker ravines tangled with blackberry, sumac, and poison ivy, the riverbanks bedded in basalt and shadowed by cottonwood and locust-all have drawn…
The Lost Year: ‘Flight’
We hadn’t yet left the house when the first harbinger hit. It was late May and almost two years since Wife No. 5’s departure (my mother was No. 1 and would have left my father like the other four if she hadn’t had a stroke first). I found him standing at the big picture window,…
Queen of the Road
It was Sheila, 10 years younger than I was, 60 pounds lighter, and nimble as a goat, who first had the idea, and watching her get a good grip on the lowest rail, take a little leap, and begin climbing up the stacks of that car-hauler, I remembered what she told me when we first…
Full Moon over Utah
I was sitting on a curb behind the AmericInn, having a smoke. They’d put me in a room on the top floor, four stories up, with a nice view of the town’s new temple, but the windows didn’t open. They never do anymore. I filled a water bottle with wine, took the elevator down. Between…
Spokane Is a Coat: 1978
Because you’re weary of the Idaho winter and country boys in their barn jackets and think that what you must need is a real city fix, you trade shifts at Lewiston’s only disco, where you work as a cocktail waitress, pack your curling iron and makeup in your purse (you don’t own a suitcase), pawn…
The Pirate of Spirit Lake
Spirit Lake was quiet at night, vacation homes edging the shore like distant ships. Ambra Zanetti hung her legs from the dock that sat higher above the water than it had the day before. The lake was dropping, the engineers said, because of holes punched in its clay bottom by pilings pounded in 100 years…
That Delicate Membrane, the Heart
I PULLED my eyes from the hospital window, from the view of snow-covered mountains, and watched as my father struggled to raise himself from his bed. “You can’t get up, Dad.” I pressed my fingers into his shoulder, and he glared at me, his blue eyes wild with morphine and what the doctors called intensive-care-unit…
What ‘Mad Men’ Means to Me
When you’re a writer who lives in the West, and you have a literary agent in Manhattan, it’s easy for certain things to get lost in translation: a three-hour time difference sometimes means that her phone call wakes me at 5:00 a.m., while my interpretation of a 5:00 p.m. by-closing-time deadline is set to my…
The Wages of Sin (A Personal History of Economics)
I am ten when the older boy from our little fundamentalist church places a dime in my hand and says that I can keep it if I’ll let him touch my knee. We’ve been playing hide-and-seek and have taken refuge in the parsonage’s stairway, a steep and secret ascent to the slope-roofed bedrooms. Dusky…