Riverside Drive

"It wasn't as if I I didn't want to work. I did. I had even gone to the social security office the month before to get my social security number. I needed money. The Catholic high school cost a lot, and Papa said nobody went to the public school unless you wanted to turn out bad." – Cisneros, from House on Mando Street

Paddling the Bike Trail

You could never find it in yourself to blame the little yellow house. It stood out on the corner, on the other side of the bridge, as something like a Tuscan revelation, really, something else entirely from the rest of the neighborhood. Mother had said the previous owner lived in Europe most of the time and then when she came home, she wanted to Europe to move back along with her. "There were nights that we lived here," said Sandy, the construction owner of the company who had worked on the little yellow house for years, perfecting it, building courtyards where there had been none, garages out of nothing, even raising the house a foot to protect it from the possibility of the river across the street. "We are sorry," Sandy said, when he came after the flood, "but it never would have mattered." It had rained for three weeks nearly straight. The two of us and Puppy watched darkness from the upstairs windows. Traffic had slowed, the city had become quiet. Each time the enormous bus drove past in its deep hum it seemed to slow as it approached the bridge, wondering if it would make it this time for the water continued rise up to its bottom to the point where cancers could no longer paddle underneath without ducking. It was the very first day that we realized the river was flooding across the street from our little yellow house that Shannon and I kayaked all the way up the Yahara River without much permission...