At the first Thanksgiving I celebrated with my future husband-to-be, my future in-laws whom I love dearly served turkey, mashed potatoes, and corn. And maybe rolls. That's it. And I said, "That's not Thanksgiving. That's just Thursday." Where were the exotic, calorie-laden dishes that only appear once a year? The puzzling mincemeat pie, the savory dressing, the sweets like cookies and chocolates and pastries? That's more like it. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. Perhaps it's an unconventional choice, but one that makes sense given that I grew up playing jump-rope with the poverty line . My family didn't host or attend cook-outs on Labor Day or Memorial Day, and never bought fireworks on Fourth of July. Christmastime was often excitement tinged with disappointment and forced merriment I didn't enjoy. But Thanksgiving Days were full of delicious once-a-year foods, thanks to community pantry donations that made our food stamps go farther .  Leadi...

  Don't. I really mean it. You think it will be fun, but it won't. You think it will be all family bonding, laughing while inexplicably wading through a vat of uncooked corn kernels, sipping cider on an outlandishly oversized, rough-hewn wooden swing while gazing at one another lovingly. It will not be like that. It will be hell on a farm, which is already a kind of hell, with goats scream-bleating at you and children getting rub-burns on snot-slick plastic slides after losing their squares of scratchy carpet and expensive small-batch caramel corn flying everywhere and $50 for a lumpy pumpkin you have to hack off the prickly vine yourself and someone will cry. Someone is always crying. Sometimes that someone is you. And there is no alcohol for purchase at this farm. Stay home and stream a movie instead. Microwave popcorn is fine.

Almost five years ago, I gifted the world a list of Things I Never Thought I'd Have to Say , an ongoing collection of utterances that made me pause and think, "WTF did I just say to my child?"  Gems included please don't lick the dog , we don't cook our friends , and  don't high-five him in the face. Since 2020, I have said dozens more of these bizarre sentences to the two small humans who live in my house and follow me around, asking for snacks and screen time.  Because parenting is weird. Any time you try to teach another person what shouldn't be eaten, how to be kind to others, and also how to act in public, things are bound to get muddled. It's time for an update of what I've said.  Strange sentences about food Please don't put Goldfish in your ears Don't hit yourself in the face with carrots. You have cranberry sauce on your glasses. Please don't put hot dogs inside your pockets. There's no reason to ever take syrup into the ba...

I carried a pink lunchbox every day.  Bumpy and thick, the molded plastic was designed to keep the contents cold during sweltering Texas school days. The outside had horizontal furrows, too narrow to stick my finger inside, but I traced them anyway like they were Braille and I was trying to understand life. The inside of the lunchbox featured separate compartments for a sandwich and chips, plus a Thermos or can of Coke (it's all called Coke in Texas).  Actual lunchbox, photo courtesy of eBay But on this day there was no drink, and the lunchbox was considerably lighter at the loss.  It must have been the end of the month, because at home we had run out of whatever I usually brought to drink in the school cafeteria. There would be no trips to the grocery store until my dad got paid, our next booklet of paper food stamp coupons arrived, or we found time and gas money to visit the SoS Spirit of Sharing pantry in the next town over. It was the late '80s, either 3rd or 5th grad...

Do you remember when forever was a summer? When only the sprinkler held us accountable. When our souls were fed on popsicles and bologna sandwiches.  Now we're the ones feeding to others dreams and gluten-free nuggets. But you and me and our banana-seat bicycles, we used to fly down the gravel road so dusty we left waves baking in our wake.  We caught tadpoles in the creek and watched as they grew legs, then we laid on the red plaid blanket under a rain of fireworks. Colors so vibrant against the vast black, they didn't seem real.  We sailed on station wagon road-trips, vinyl back seat hot on our thighs, no air conditioning, just our hand dipping in the headwind. Sunshine so bright in our eyes, we were blind to adulthood. So how did we get here?  We fell through all those weeks with sunburned cheeks and ice cream melting down our small wrists. We played gin rummy all day with nothing else to do but sing along to the radio, and time got lost. When fireflies made ...

Do you remember what I was like back then, a food stamps kid so out of place among the shiny glass towers and $150 designer jeans and yet you hired me despite the uncertainty in my eyes and my lack of marketing experience but I guess I write a good cover letter and I can still remember how expensive the stores smelled and the Alamo-shaped facade of the building where I cut my teeth and I wanted so much to be as cool as you, so devil-may-care with your tinted glasses lenses and longish hair and gravelly voice and not a one of my business classes ever mentioned how much swearing there'd be in a creative office but not me I never said the right thing, never fit in, never rocked to the easy rhythm of belonging even that summer when most of the building went to happy hour every Thursday and I learned how to drink with all the young up-and-comings in Midtown and Deep Ellum and Lower Greenville and you used to rib me joking asking if you could buy my first and last drink because I'd h...