Praise our choices, sister, for each doorway open to us was taken by squads of fighting women who paid years of trouble and struggle, who paid their wombs, their sleep, their lives that we might walk through these gates upright. Doorways are sacred to women for we are the doorways of life and we must choose what comes in and what goes out. Freedom is our real abundance.

I am a driven writer. I feel guilty if I don't write, not self-indulgent if I do.

Our wedding plans please everybody as if we were fertilizing the earth and creating social luck.

Like species, couples die out or evolve.

With my poems, I finally won even my mother. The longest wooing of my life.

There are obviously a great many ways to organize some fraction of the material in a life.

I communicate much better with cats, usually. I know them and their body language - as my own cats know mine very well. Cats are adept at reading subtle signals.