Jessica
About this author:
Jessica O’Dwyer worked for 20 years in magazine publishing, art museums, and as a high-school English teacher. After she and her husband adopted their daughter from Guatemala, she was so moved by the experience she felt compelled to find a way to share her story. She joined the Writing Mamas in 2004, where she found a supportive community of other mothers with their own stories to tell.
Jessica’s essays have been published in the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine, Adoptive Families, and the Marin Independent Journal; aired on KQED-FM; and won awards from the National League of American Pen Women. She has taken workshops with Joyce Maynard, participated in the Squaw Valley Workshop, and is a dedicated student of classes at Book Passage. Her first book, MAMALITA: AN ADOPTION MEMOIR, was published by Seal Press in November 2010. Visit her at http://www.mamalitathebook.com
My Articles:
Chocolate Cake for Breakfast
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Before I had two children, I never understood how my mother let us eat chocolate cake for breakfast and potato chip sandwiches for lunch.
The Harvest
The harvest is in! Peaches, plums, strawberries, nectarines! Raspberries, apricots, mandarin oranges! Ripe and juicy, plump and sweet. Hanging like Christmas ornaments, gleaming in the morning sun.
We grab our wicker baskets and hats, and pull on our long-sleeved shirts. We tromp down the stone steps to the garden beds at the bottom of our back slope. The branches are loaded!
“Lizard!” Mateo calls out, as a gecko scurries across our path and scoots into a dark space between the stones. My son crouches down to lizard level, eyeball to eyeball with the prehistoric thing. “Green!”
Memorial Day Thoughts
One Saturday a month, my husband, Tim, two children, and I pile into the minivan for an hour-long drive from our home in Marin to Travis Air Force Base with the express purpose of shopping in the Commissary. My husband retired as a colonel from the U.S. Army Reserves; shopping at the Commissary is the major perk.
Tim’s father was in the Army, a ticket out for a Depression-era Texas farm boy with a sixth-grade education. Tim grew up on military bases in Okinawa and Germany, Oklahoma, and Texas. When it came time for college, an ROTC scholarship was his best option. The Army paid for medical school.
Food at the Commissary is cheaper than it is at our local Safeway, and we don’t have to pay tax. They check your I.D. at the door — which is inconvenient when wrangling two small kids — but they check I.D. everywhere on a military base. Once you’re inside, the Commissary is the same as any other grocery store, circa 1975, which looks to be the year of its last renovation. But don’t buy fruit or the vegetables: they’re awful. I’m not sure why this is, but Tim tells me when he lived in Okinawa, the Army shipped gallons of milk to the troops, frozen, by boat. Maybe the Commissary uses the same technique with vegetables, even in this modern age of refrigeration.
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