The guest bedroom is the only room in our home my mom doesn’t cover with wallpaper when she marries. Assuming this door will almost always stay closed, she sees no need. She leaves the walls the same color—a pale olive—that was chosen by her in-laws when they moved here themselves early in their marriage, believing as she does that none of her own family will ever spend much time here. No one who wanders into this space, as she imagines, will want to stay for long inside this room whose windows …

MATERIALS LIST: Pizza box. 20oz plastic bottle. Chicken wire. Newspaper. Flour. Water. Paint. TOOLS: Box Cutter. Serrated knife. Wire Cutters. Gloves. Staple Gun. Super glue. Mixing bowl. Paint brushes. Measuring Cup. ▲ It’s difficult for you to pinpoint when it started. This barking up the wrong tree. Free, yet overwhelmed with whatever marker you’ve used at that time to define a life, and a place, and a job, and a class, and a relationship, or the time that passed since its end, and …

My mother’s iron was heavy, with a speckled cord and stubby plug. In the cellar, she and I pressed  my father’s shirts. He worked a desk job he’d never dreamed of growing up in a South End tenement, working a machine in a nearby raincoat factory and letting it all proceed from there. His Aunt Sadie, who cleaned rich peoples’ houses, spoke to a priest who got him off the line.  His life, and my mother’s and mine, proceeded from there.  His desk job was the kind people from his …