My father was in the Canadian Air force so we moved around a lot. Somewhere in the mid-70s, when my sister and I were wearing bellbottoms and getting high off the beeswax candles at our Waldorf school, my parents discovered meditation and hypnosis (dad), bra-burning and feminism (mom), and pot-smoking and cocktailing with the neighbors.  My mom embraced the Equal Rights Amendment, while my father embraced several yoga-loving strangers with predictable not-my-mother names like Gloria and June. They tried, our parents, but divorced several years later. 

After high school, I left Canada and traveled throughout Europe, North Africa and Israel. I stayed gone for more than a year, managed to miss my mother’s wedding, while eating hash brownies in Amsterdam, falling infatuated with a Portuguese bartender, escaping not one but two kibbutzes in Israel.  I held waitressing jobs in several countries to pay my way – beer-soaked rags still smell like freedom to me. Finally came home, went to college where I spent boozy nights at poetry readings, blurry mornings as a varsity athlete, and days at the library reading and napping. I earned a degree and promptly got a job at a community newspaper in Northern California. The salary barely covered my gas bill, but as I slaved beside the thrump-thrump-thrump of the presses churning out newsprint and charry ink, I learned. I covered everything from civic politics to the spring’s largest zucchini.  Pumpkins too.

After my foray into small-town newspapers, I got a job writing travel guides for a major publisher.  Writing guidebooks is not rocket science, nor is it all that creatively fulfilling. It’s about research and banalities like bus schedules, narrow points on a map and off-season room rates. But it gave me a decade of glorious independent travel, and more buried fodder than I’ll ever know how to exhume. Along the way, I met and married a great man. We moved all over the place and now live in Oregon with our dog and twin 3-year-old boys. I’ve ditched my backpack and independence for the privilege and responsibility of raising two self-aware men who, for now, prefer to be naked and pee in the grass.  I used to feel energized and passionate about writing; after years of lingering on the topsoil, I’m ready to dig a little deeper to find out if the passion is still there.