here i am

There is a panadería here in town that makes the best Pastel de Tres Leches in the universe. A. turned 5 today, and besides the locura that is the piñata, guess what mom brought? You guessed it! If you have never tried this little bit of heaven, get yourself somewhere to try it now ! (Or you could try to make it yourself - if you are handier with an oven than I am) It is indescribably incredible, and I could eat an entire cake if someone left me in a room alone with one for any amount of time. Now, as for the piñata - you should have seen her parents' dismay as they watched her spindly and timid midwestern classmates hint ever so tentatively at trying to break this thing. I have had mixed feelings about piñatas for a long time; the whole process of beating an animal with a stick until its insides fall out - so you can scurry to collect and consume them - has always been a bit unsettling to me, in theory. But it's so much gol-darned fun! And A's mom brought up an interes...

Every box I pack has an extra load to carry. I pack into them a little sorrow. A little yearning for what is lost. There - peeking out from the corner of a box of clothes: some orange fabric of disappointment, the ruffled edge of misunderstanding. I try to pack the books into smaller boxes, so I can carry them out by myself. But they're heavier even so, than they should be... They force me to bear more than their own weight - laden as they are with hidden bricks of anger. I didn't want my leaving to become a weapon. The dull sword's edge of resentment. But these boxes aren't moving themselves to the car on their own. Some pain must lift them off this unswept floor... Something of the fight left in me to acknowledge all the small and quiet wrongs of this thing; oh, the big things stare you loudly in the face and you can laugh them down, stuffing them into the closet under a fluffy duvet... But the small things - the kitchen utensils of pettiness and picture frames and...