How wide and sweet and wild motherhood and sisterhood can be.

Friends are supposed to act like harbor boats-let you know if you're off course. But it ain't always possible.

I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.

As a writer, I am not goddess of the universes I create. I am at most a stage manager of the plentiful gifts which tumble out of the horn of plenty, which is to say there is a source so sweet and forgiving and generous that I pray every day to let that source be my guide.

There is the truth of history, and there is the truth of what a person remembers.

I swear I could write a book about all the things no one has ever thanked me for.

A scent that disturbs me and delights me. It smells like ripe pears, vetiver, a bit of violet and something else- something spicy almost biting and exotic.