Where the Grass Still Sings: An excerpt

As a child, I thought of all living creatures as part of my extended family. Several years after my father left my mother, and a month after her artist’s residency in Colorado had come to an end, my mother took her two daughters—my little sister, Anna, six, and me, eleven—and her dog back to the Midwest, where she had lived when she was still married. Life in cooperative art centers had been rich in many ways but did not produce much money, so when some friends offered to let us live in a barn on one of their unused properties, she took it. At the time, I did not realize that we were living in poverty. Poverty was never something I really thought about as a child. Owing largely to my mother’s ingenuity, my life seemed rich in many nonmonetary ways. The reality I lived in was the only one I knew, and so it never struck me as unusual, and certainly not sad, though when I tell stories to my daughter now, she often uses those words. But my mother has a shining, relentlessly optimistic spirit, and to her, living in a barn seemed like a rare opportunity to experience something unique and adventurous—and its being free made it especially attractive. So we moved into the barn.

Keep reading

Reality, whatever that may be, has been so much the rage in the rhetoric of entertainment of late that it should be no surprise if, on any given day anywhere in the world, any of us can watch what may seem the most minor dramas streamed to either the largest screens or the most personal of devices. Maybe on your watch, you see squabbling or flirting in the kitchen. Perhaps, off in the living room, you watch sleeping. Perhaps the walls are literally crawling with frenzy. Just at that moment, you might believe you’re watching housewives or debutantes or roommates or spring breakers. If you’re in New Orleans, you might, in fact, not be watching the latest offering by Bravo but, instead, the Audubon Butterfly Garden and Insectarium, whose Cockroach House allows viewers in the insectarium to see a host of cockroaches swarming through living,
dining, and kitchen spaces. Could it be that on the tiny television, they might be watching themselves on a channel on Animal Planet, which has, at times at least, broadcast the carnival on its live cockroach cam for viewers across the globe?

Keep reading