Jar of Glass: Words Collected by Tamara Lopez

 Dear Joshua,    Recently, a wonderful man who I had the honor of meeting on several occasions passed away way too soon. As I was driving home from Redding today, I thought about him and the last conversation I had with him. I told him that I had not been writing, but I was dreaming about it. I would wake up in the middle of the night and the words "You are a writer" would be imprinted in my brain. He told me, "Well, then you need to write." It was so simple, but sometimes the things we know in our heart need to be said out loud. As I was thinking about that conversation, my mind began to focus on you and a letter composed itself in my head. I thought about if I really needed to write it or if you just knew, and then I thought about what this man had said to me, "Well, then you need to write," so here I am seven years after your death, writing you a letter.     Sometimes when I have a moment to myself, when the obligations of life are not calling me in eve...

   As of May, I "own" a lawn, a front one and a back one, in fact. As of August, a gopher has laid claim to the front lawn, and where there was once a green, lush, unmarred bed of grass, there is now the construction of an elaborate gopher mansion with brown mounds of dirt strategically placed to get the choicest grubs. This gopher had no permits, no land title, no consideration of how its presence would affect me. It has taken something that I was proud of and killed it aesthetically (kind of like how strip malls have killed the beauty of the natural landscape). This miscreant gopher has strip malled my front lawn.      When I saw the first mound, I didn't think it was a big deal. It was just an animal trying to survive. I believe in coexistence; I could handle one mound. When I saw the second mound, I did what any person would do in a crisis; I turned to Google .  Google gave me lots of options which seemed to favor non-lethal methods of extraction. Upon...

 Yesterday, I went on an early morning walk on  a road that cuts through the valley allowing for views of the small town on the bank of the river, the rolling pastures, and the fields of green. There is inevitably a sighting of  mountain quail skittering across the road, and the cows and horses stare as the lone wanderer or occasional bike rider passes by. I regularly walk this route because I can walk for miles on end and take in the lazy landscape. Occasionally, a person in a car stops and assumes I am lost and offers a ride. On this particularly walk, I heard the sound of a car pull up behind me and stop, and a man asked through his open window, "Hablas Espanol?" I responded, "Solamente un poquito." He proceeded to ask me where I live. I was not about to give some stranger my address, so I responded in very vague terms. He said, "I have lived here for thirty years and have never seen you. Where do you live?" He was very insistent on knowing where I live...