Category: Thoughts

I’m sitting in a screened porch overlooking the Gulf of Mexico in Grand Isle, Louisiana. The waves build and crash, the air is heavy with salt, the palm trees, marshes and piers make a familiar silhouette. I love the Gulf, and I’ve staying in countlesss beach houses just like this one. Whether I’m in St.Teresa,…

Late 1960s Happiness came easy, like falling asleep in the car, like Santa. Roadrunner’s beep-beeps. The wayback of the station wagon. This smell, or the arc of water my grandmother sprayed while ironing shirt after shirt of the laundry she was paid to do.  A small doll with tufts of blonde hair named Pamela.  I named…

Do you ever feel as though the last ten or twenty years may have been a dream?  Concerned that your adulthood is a precarious sham perpetrated by capitalism and a greedy psychotherapist who keeps sending you in harm’s way just to reap the inevitable hourly-billed benefits of your defeat? Constantly feel on edge that at…

Instead of driving home after taking a breakfast picnic to the shores of Alligator Point, I dropped MS at her house and then drove to the laundromat. The good one, the newish one. The good laundromat is a one-trick-pony steampunk revival neo-casino-factory at your command. Rows and rows of heavy-duty machines churn to life on…

So my friend Alice calls me. Alice: What is “offsides?” Deb: Like in soccer? Alice: Of course, World Cup, hello? You are the soccer mom, can you explain it to me? Deb: Over the phone? Alice: Why not? Deb: Typically you need notepaper, chalk, or piles of coins to explain the intricacies of offside offenses….

The Gulf of Mexico holds the story the last two decades of my life. The Gulf wooed me here to Florida. Days and nights spent on the gulf shores have given me more than shells as mementos. I’ve watched my most precious things transform in its magical waters: my children swimming stronger each year, my…

Don’t you love learning new vocabulary words? You then get to use them three times the next week in important conversations, fights with AT&T customer service reps, and Scrabble games, and you just can’t believe how you lived so many years without knowing that awesome word. It’s like discovering wafflecones or your G-spot for the…

On a lark I recently clicked a bit searching for a high school friend I’ve lost touch with, thinking about how I screwed up her chance to shoot the objects of her desire. Celeste was a journalism comrade who spent every afternoon in our schools’ darkroom. I helped her sometimes, shaking developer over rolls of…

MS and I spent a long, beautiful weekend at the beach. We brought very little with us, some salmon, some music, some clothes, not enough champagne. Why is there either too much or never enough champagne? And we brought Maverick. River did not get to come because we were in a wine-and-lounge-chairs mood, not a…

My friend told me about how understanding gluten has changed her life, and it truly helped me understand mine. Because it is never too early in a conversation to turn it around and make it about me. Her: So after all of those tests, and camera yo-yoing through my innards, and treatment for ulcers and…