Women Who Eat Chocolate

"We are ghosts to you. We don't exist until you want our sympathy or help. You don't think your vote will really count, because you want to see what "happens." It's a vote against us and you don't see that. It's a vote against me. We are ghosts until you want us, but we were never there if you didn't see us until it counted." - quoted by someone I love, 9/24 I am lost.  Awash. Drifting in a sea of distractions. Fraught and edgy. Simple and deep. My thoughts betray me and I cannot sleep. We the people. No longer are we the people we say we are.  We are washed in the blood of Jesus and drowning in our own hypocrisy. We cry out for the blood to flow from the bodies of our brothers and sisters in lands far away - those who cry for our help - as well as turn a blind eye to the ones dying in our streets at alarming levels, shouting, "He should have listened."  We cry "Save the babies!" while we kill those in priso...

On the home stretch of finishing my novel. 62K words! But right now, this is how I feel. Come read me on The Holmes County Bargain Hunter :  I don’t want to write anymore. My brain is tired, and my novel is snugly tucked inside Microsoft Word, where it can’t hurt anyone; yet, I can feel its sharp teeth biting at me, pulling me slowly under where I must acquiesce to the venom it exudes. When it’s done, I will offer it to you like a sacrifice on a golden alter because it had to be written. I’m mostly a writer of small pages, words made shiny and formed cohesively to hold your attention for 10 minutes at a time. I can take a subject and spin it on its head, the heft of the word document filed neatly in the time it takes to ride the words to their crest. I’m a wordsmith of tidy detailed musings, and what possessed me to think I could write a novel still baffles me as the coffee goes down bitter. My husband, lover of all things me, born adrift on a story that propelled him to me long...

Read this, and all my columns, weekly at The Holmes County Bargain Hunter :  We are not immune to the horrors of this world. It will live in us until we cast it out and then rein in carefully with love. This morning I woke to a world that had the breath of valued human beings taken out yet again. They were ripped, targeted and snuffed out in the terrible minutes and span of a hot June Florida night.  Stories of grown men are trickling out, stories of them texting their moms, pleading for help ironically from the stalls of a bathroom, the terror building as the communication was cut short and they were gone. Lives taken away by someone who deemed them unworthy to live.  I mourn with those who mourn. My murmurings felt dry as my mouth is a burning desert sent into the stratosphere with a tongue that has uttered the same laments over the years in alarming fashion. It’s another massacre, another shooting, another day.  On cue my social media feeds blew up: talk of gun...

I'm posting the second part of my column on cooking here on my personal blog this week. I need a good reason to get you here anyway! Find all my columns on The Holmes County Bargain Hunter.  In which I learn that cooking equals love: Part 2 By: Melissa Herrera I sat at the table in my first kitchen looking out over the vast expanse of valley outside my window. I’ll admit to not making coffee before I got married, as I didn’t learn to love it while living at home. But I could smell it, so I figured I was doing something right. I was twenty-one, and had years of Holmes County cooking under my belt, with a husband - who while loving my cooking - sometimes longed for the tastes he’d grown up with. When we left Mexico for home months before, got married, and moved into our own home – I was unwavering in the task set before me. I would learn to cook proper Mexican food even if it killed me. In between tuna casseroles and chicken and rice meals, I experimented. I started off...

I write what I feel and lately I've been feeling a lot. A little bit like life inside our fence is a bit narrow and tight. Read on from my column on The Holmes County Bargain Hunter :  Missy's Life inside the Fence We built a fence around our yard when we bought our house back in ‘96. Our kids were tiny, and my husband had grown up knowing many fences that surrounded baked-tile courtyards, with stucco buildings. They were warm, happy places you could sit and have coffee in the morning or find shade in the late afternoon as the hot sun slipped away from the day. It wasn’t a way of keeping people out; it was part of their culture, a way of affording privacy in tightly packed streets full of people. I had never had a fence, growing up in the center of Berlin, and was used to running barefoot through the neighbor’s yards. It didn’t matter where you ran; you were always welcome, allowed to roam at will through the neighborhood. There was a wild freedom to it, knowing your light ...

As I contemplated my third cup of coffee this morning, I was also thinking on other things. There's the usual world peace, homelessness, and mom getting her wig today for her upcoming chemo treatments. Lots of things flitting through my mind, per the usual Saturday morning. I sipped leisurely. There's also things that don't matter as well. Some of those things include whether my toilet has been cleaned, my ignoring the alarmingly large amount of sticks brought down in the front yard over winter, and the size of Donald Trump's privates. For that last thing, I drained my coffee cup and set it down gingerly. Clearly, the angry people of America will feel better knowing he has the size to handle anything the presidency has to offer.  Friends, this election has drained me and it's only the first of March. I blame myself for watching all the debates and getting sucked in like a whirling dervish. I'm the first to admit that I live tweet all the action. Here ...