The night crackled ... Everything had turned to static electricity in the heat. I combed my hair to watch the sparks fly from the ends.

It was her first book, an indigo cover with a silver moonflower, an art nouveau flower, I traced my finger along the silver line like smoke, whiplash curves. ... I touched the pages her hands touched, I pressed them to my lips, the soft thick old paper, yellow now, fragile as skin. I stuck my nose between the bindings and smelled all the readings she had given, the smell of unfiltered cigarettes and the espresso machine, beaches and incense and whispered words in the night. I could hear her voice rising from the pages. The cover curled outward like sails.

For lunch, we drove into the hills and parked in the dappled shade of a big sycamore, its powdery white bark like a woman's body against the uncanny blue sky.

Electricity, the peril the wind sings to in the wires on a gray day. . .

Most women experience issues of power and sexuality, but very few women talk about it. There's the threat of the loss of approval.

My mother never met a gadget she didn't like. There were tube pans for baking the angel food cakes my father could have after his first heart attack, and Bundt pans and loaf pans and baking pans and grilling pans.