Hobo Stripper

(Or, the dilemma’s that arise in WalMart parking lots.)
I’m sleeping in a walmart parking lot and I’m next to this RV that’s here every time I’m here. Like, I think these people have lived at this walmart for years.
Anyways, they’re drunk and fighting (and it’s like 4:30am here) and guy A pushed guy B out [...]

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My mom and her husband were going the same way I was, so we decided to loosely follow each other and get pizza together a couple hundred miles down the road. I left her house first and hurried to get ahead of them so I didn’t fall too far behind when I stopped to [...]

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I could have waded across a couple shallow rivers and streams, walked a few miles, and come out across the river from a boat launch that’s very busy for hunting season, but I wanted to get my boat out of the water before things freeze up. Also, even though it’s been raining and raining [...]

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“Tara?” He’s asking, tentative. He looks absolutely the same, plus facial hair.
“Omigoddess, I haven’t seen you in years!! How are you?”
“I’m married and I have six kids now! This is my oldest daughter, Rain.”
“Wow… to that same woman? The one that was writing the book?”
Yeah, the same woman. They [...]

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If any woman, anywhere in the world, hears footfalls behind her on a darkened street, she has reason to be afraid. Robin Morgan called that the democracy of fear under patriarchy. - Derrick Jensen
Lona is becoming a woman, and my motherly friend has been instructing her in all the necessary things. Make up, clothes, how [...]

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I wake up to the softstrong lull of ocean waves and the sweet sting of salty wind. The first thing I see is the ocean, but my eyes are heavy and the next thing I know I’m dreaming of mushrooms and revolutions. When I wake again the ocean is still there, the breeze [...]

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I’m barefoot in a little cotton dress when I hit the river, running into it like my feet have always known it. Some of the fishermen, standing knee deep in the water, one every few feet as far as I can see, stare at me. Some don’t. I dive and catch the salmon just as [...]

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 “Hey! Womens!”
 
My mom sighs. “God, I hate this.”
 
“Really?” I think she should be used to it and good at handling it. After all, she was an adult when I was a kid and I was just a child. But she is scared like a newbie stripper, and maybe that explains my childhood a little.
 
“Yeah. I [...]

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“Aw,” She says. “Poor baby girl, you’ve worked yourself half to death.”
“Mmhmm,” I nod sleepily, I have worked every day since I got to Alaska. It’s noon and I have to get up, even though I just got here and fell asleep in the driveway a few hours ago. Healer heard my [...]

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I call her first, when I cross into cell phone land. Of course I do. She is my sanity, my guru, my mother figure. A million times she’s birthed my changing with her words, and now she lays in a bed in a big scary city and I roam the world in [...]

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