Honey, there ain't no through. I had an interesting conversation with one of our staff this morning. She is a young, thirty-three-year-old woman who has been working with us for more than three years, growing steadily from apprentice to production manager. She grew up on a coffee farm in a remote Panamanian village, raised by her grandparents. She left home at sixteen, barely literate. Since then, she has lived and worked in Canada, California, Brazil, and [...]
When I left my backpack on a train in Seville, I thought I had lost something irreplaceable. Inside was a small jar containing my mother's ashes. This is the story of a promise, a journey to Spain, and a garden of yellow roses at the Alhambra.
Shortly after my mother died, a group of my womyn friends gave me a small potted rose bush to commemorate her. It wasn’t much to look at—no buds, a few wilted leaves, weary from transport and neglect. But there it was nonetheless. A living thing. A promise. A few days before Christmas, after returning from her memorial service, I came home and noticed the rose had put out a single bud. I watched it gather itself. On Christmas Eve, it opened—pale yellow, edged with deep fuchsia pink. On Christmas morning, it released a soft, old-fashioned rose scent.
