Non-Fiction

When my grandmother died, my mother reported that her last words were: “Is that all?” Although I was not present at her death, I doubted this.

My daughter, now eighteen, is vibrant and healthy. Julia Rose has wild curly blonde hair that frames her face like a lion’s mane.

I walk into my parents’ home to pick my mom up for a family gathering, and like most days over the past few weeks, palpable sorrow greets me at the door.

While growing up in Spanish Harlem – El Barrio as we knew it during the exhilarating years of the 1970s and 80s – diversity was my monarch, acceptance my culture, and faith my freedom.

Good friends are hard to find. Some friendships are centred around convenience; we build attachments to those around us simply because they are there.

I am on the second floor of the De Young Museum in San Francisco, California, sitting on a marvelous curved, but slightly uncomfortable, wooden bench…

I am borne of a landscape of freckles. My mother, her father, his mother: the Williams and Shepherds, the English and Welsh. The bounty of peach farms, peace roses and quiet spirituality.

I’m holding your drawing. It’s more of a map, really, a magic-marker rendering of your family’s redesign. Embellished stick figures rise…

They say that life has a way of giving you exactly what you need when you least expect it. That when one life ends, another is born.