All Over the Map

How timely Caesar Chavez Day is this year.     Here in sunny San Diego County we’ve had endless, record breaking rain these past months.     As much as we always need rain, this has been extreme.     Streets are flooding. Boulders are falling down hillsides. Freeways are shutting down due to sinkholes. And work has practically dried up for residential gardeners, the people who keep our trees trimmed and our yards weed free.     These are the people who have no insurance, paid vacations or sick days. Many of them are trying to stay off the radar as they wait in an endless line for the papers that would make them legal residents, and they are often exploited and taken advantage of.     Talk about being vulnerable.     Over the years my husband and I have come to know and care about our gardener and his family.  They are indigenous Guatemalans and the language they speak is  Q'anjob'al .   It sounds like t...

        From the moment my first child was born in 1986, the most important thing in the world to me was being a mother. When my children are happy I’m happy and when they’re struggling, I struggle too.  There is nothing that could have prepared me for how much of one’s heart, body and soul motherhood consumes.       Which is why, when I heard the news on June 24   last year that Roe V. Wade had been overturned, my cries of “No! No! Oh please, no!” joined the chorus of millions across the country as the cruelty of this ruling sank in.      I thought about “Betty,” a woman in her 80’s who I always enjoyed chatting to in our library bookstore. One day we were talking about Judy Blume’s gift for writing about subjects that preteens hate talking to their parents about -- like puberty and bullying -- when she told me how, when she was 15, she’d had a crush on a young soldier who was stati...