Author, Journalist, Pop Folklorist
This past weekend was Orthodox Easter, which Amalia, my husband, and I spent with my parents in Worcester, Massachusetts. Amalia’s arrival was greeted with delight by her grandparents/rabid fans. But somewhere amid the flurry of preparations for the holiest day in the Orthodox calendar, we learned that there was another visitor in Worcester, one who…
Read more about See No Evil: Easter, Facebook, and Where the Bodies Are Buried
As a folklorist, I often feel that marketing messes with holidays. I don’t want to think about Halloween the day after the fourth of July, but the drugstore and the “seasonal” aisle of the supermarket and the forests worth of catalogs that arrive at my door want me to, because there’s really no big ticket…
Read more about From Pumpkin Spice Latte to Pitaya Juice: An Autumnal Journey
A week ago my daughter Amalia turned one. One of the things that freaked me out about kids before I had one of my own was the way they serve as a physical manifestation of the passage of time. There are entire eras of my life where a year or two could pass without anything…
Read more about Act Like a Baby: Life Lessons from a One-Year-Old
Over the course of her 11 months of life, my daughter has become the proud of owner of not one but two little teddy bears that say “Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep”, one dressed in blue pyjamas which recites it in English, and the other in pink jammy jams, speaking Spanish. I had…
“Life is a circle,” my cousin said. Or maybe it was “life is a cycle”—you could translate the Greek word either way. We were talking about my daughter’s baptism, which took place on Sunday in Worcester, Massachusetts, where I grew up. My cousin came from the island of Corfu, Greece, to act as Amalía’s godmother,…
Read more about The Circle Dance: The Sacred and the Mundane
I was trolling Facebook on my phone and sloppily dribbling breast milk onto my skirt when I first saw the Time magazine cover asking me if I’m “mom enough.” On the one hand, the breast milk confirmed I am, indeed, a mother. On the other, the question, with it’s sassy little adverb, and the picture…
