Posted by Allison Gruber on Nov 8, 2018

When the rain stops falling in the Catalina Foothills, my father-in-law takes me outside to smell creosote. He gestures broadly to the vast desert before us: “All that’s glistening is creosote,” he says, and leans over the adobe wall bordering his property, picks a small clump of leaves from a tree, puts them to my nose. “Smell that.” As I’m inhaling...

Posted by Allison Gruber on Oct 4, 2018

While he drove me and my brother to school, my father listened to traffic reports. The newscasters spoke so fast their words smeared together and I always heard, “Inbound on the outbound Kennedy you’re looking at an hour five,” causing me, from an early age, to believe (somewhat correctly) that navigating the Chicago expressway system was one of life’s...