Fran Wescott

I spent the night at Machu Picchu. Traveling with my parents, sisters and mother’s parents, we were an unwieldy party of seven when we boarded ourselves and our luggage onto an ancient train with thread-bare seats. Women sold steaming ears of pale yellow corn wrapped in newspaper. Mom purchased some for herself and her mother through an open window on the train. As I remember it, Mom and Gunkey (my grandmother’s unlikely family name) seemed to scoff at conventional wisdom about the relative danger of eating corn from grubby sheets of cast-off Peruvian newspaper. I thought Mom and Gunkey were such badasses. I seem to remember that I got a bite, hoping perhaps to be a badass by association. We chugged and rumbled and rattled along in the train, kept company by dozens of people – some local, some assuredly not. It was a raucous atmosphere with lots of talking, correction at top volume of playful but unruly children and laughter. Already mountainous when we started the trip,

I’m starting a new professional journey. I’ve decided to do something wild and woolly: I’m going to live and be guided by my heart. I’m a writer. I’m a communicator. I’m a storyteller. I’m going to find people and organizations that want to employ those skills. It’s time. I need to find out now what it feels like to run on all fucking cylinders. It’s simple enough to state that as intention. In fact, it’s felt very organic and “right” to set out on this professional journey with just that much in my pocket. But here’s the catch: you also have to have faith. And faith is a tricky thing. Sometimes faith comes to the party attached at the hip with doubt. You don’t recognize it until faith gets good and comfortable and decides to be noticed. I know this because I have had a few moments of doubt during this so-far-short journey. OK, I’ve had more than a few moments of doubt. I’ve had several dozen moments of doubt. OK, maybe a few more moments than that; but in the end – always in the

I have always written and yet never considered myself a writer. I’d written overly-long emails detailing the days’ events; I’d written formally first for college (honors thesis) and then for work (television producer). But up until my participation last year in my first writers’ workshop, I’d never considered myself a writer. And I’d never considered that what I was writing belonged to me. I was either proposing a theory about the relationship between Shakespeare’s English history plays and Elizabethan Historiography; telling the story of my children’s youth; or relaying a critical shift in public policy. I didn’t feel that any of the words to paper reflected me or what was in my heart or tumbling around in my head. But in this last year I’ve been writing in community with some amazing Women. They have taught me so much, but perhaps most importantly (and there have been a lot of important lessons) I’ve learned that in fact those stories are mine. I’ve learned that when I sit down to

I attended earlier this week a staff event that took me out of the office, across town and right down memory lane. A nonprofit we support invited our team to come and get a tour of their operation. This organization tells me it promotes creativity, environmental awareness, and community through reuse. To support this mission it has purchased the shopping strip of my early youth to develop there instead an arts, thrift, and sustainability hub. When I looked at that strip in the morning’s bright sunshine, I could see that each element to this proposed project promises to bring to the surrounding community a desperately-needed renewal. I could certainly see the potential of their vision. But I have to say that I also saw still the hub of my late 60’s childhood. I felt so nostalgic. Where the thrift store resides, I saw still the Woolworth. That Woolworth was not only the purveyor of superior grilled cheese sandwiches, but an important resource for sundries. Woolworth w