What pounding the ground can do to you — By the time I picked up running fifteen years ago, I already had a special relationship with words and language. In college, one of my majors was French and I’d also gotten a graduate degree in translation and interpretation. I journaled intermittently and was my extended family’s editor-in-chief. But I…

I just don’t get it — In line at Starbucks the other day, the young woman ordering had a tiny dog (a Chihuahua I think) in her arms. The cashier was all ooh and aww, and they got to babbling about their dogs. …

Or was it the pilot? — Sometimes things work out for you and you know a higher power had a hand in it. It happened to me when I switched to an earlier flight from Denver to New York and lived to tell about it. The planets lined up, the dots connected, the puzzle pieces fit…

My first parenting challenge — Being a mother is a wondrous experience but it is above all terrifying, and, in a way, a liability. You love unconditionally and this kind of love always comes with suffering and fear, as I began to discover as soon as I came home from the hospital after giving birth…

For the married and unmarried — Thirty years of marriage. How is it even possible? “It really has felt like two minutes — underwater,” an acquaintance joked the other day about his similarly long marriage. Seeing as I’m very slow when it comes to jokes, this one was simple enough and made me laugh. But I…

A Day at the Aquarium — It’s rather disorienting, looking back, that my husband and I had such a nothing-can-go-wrong-for-us attitude, one that was clearly bound to kick us in the butt, when we decided to leave Venezuela to go to graduate school in Monterey, California with a baby on the way. As it happens, I…

We’ve taken at least 30 — Do you ever wish you could mute your spouse when he’s (my spouse is a “he”) telling the same “joke” he has told 137 times and which you’ve made abundantly clear is not funny AT ALL? Have you fantasized you can replay an event so your partner will admit it…