On my last afternoon as a failed trophy wife, I sat opposite my husband in a windowless conference room. My life—as wife, as mother—was laid bare. Accusations that should never be voiced were. As lawyers prodded, David and I slogged through eight shared years—divvied flat-screen TV, hummingbird lithographs, wooden lamp—divvied our five-year-old daughter’s time, David taking Ava every other weekend. I was flayed, fragmented into bits. With each parsing, each nasty jab, I grew teeny-tiny, to the verge of disappearing. David kept his golden retriever, I kept his elderly cat. I retained custody of my teenage daughter and two tortoises I had brought to our marriage. David ceded our unfinished home on Oasis Drive in Tucson. The house was our undoing, he said, because I spent more effort renovating the dwelling than advancing his career. Signing my initials to our agreement, I felt vulnerable, as worn down as the potted fiddle-leaf fig in the corner, its leaves droopy and yellowed.
“And…” David, always with the last word, said in his Cambridge-educated accent. “…I’m entitled to the Martin Avenue house.” He referred to the home I had bought with Peter, my college-boyfriend-later-husband, who had died young. “To half its equity,” David continued, with the attitude a white, middle-aged man with a PhD projected while believing he was smarter than everyone, including me, even though I had earned a PhD too.
My world shattered further. I felt off-kilter. My left knee bounced like it had when we negotiated Ava’s parenting schedule, shimmied like it had at Peter’s memorial service.
David stared at my lawyer. “Without me she can’t swing one house, let alone two,” he said to everyone but me, especially to me. “She’ll have to sell both.”
I was a child again, a shadow spoken over and across. Invisibility fanned embers, heat I hardly recognized. Sparks spluttered—rage unbecoming of a supportive wife—feelings I had tamped inside, like a tortoise withdrawing legs and head, leaving a shell for protection. Too fatigued to snuff disquietude, my sense of agency flared.
◊ ◊ ◊
While we petitioned to divorce, two conservation groups, WildEarth Guardians and Western Watersheds Project, petitioned to list the Sonoran desert tortoise (Gopherus morafkai) as a protected species under the Endangered Species Act. The 2008 request cited a 51 percent reduction of tortoises over the previous twenty years. If listed, the government’s toolbox would open: critical habitat designation, recovery plan, mitigation measures, penalties for illegal collection and unpermitted habitat degradation and fragmentation.
◊ ◊ ◊
I had no intention of owning a house, no desire to weed, haul trash to the curb on Sundays, replace heater filters. The consequences were dire: a one-way journey to boringness, not-in-my-backyard beliefs, and, the worst, turning into my parents. Weekends and vacations, my engineer father had built what my artist mother designed: moved bedrock with fulcrum and lever to craft gardens, busted out walls to create great-rooms, laid tile, shingled roofs. They were ingenious—never hired out, always figured it out—believers in hoisting themselves up by their bootstraps. By the time I met Peter, my parents had built two homes from scratch and renovated five others.
With Peter I found a kindred spirit. A New Yorker, he had attended schools where he played chess all day and marched alongside his unmarried mom in anti-Vietnam and civil rights rallies. He was as steeped in socialist beliefs as my parents were in Reagan Republicanism.
“You’re throwing away money,” Dad said of our housing choice, a Chicago three-story walk-up. “Only bums rent month-to-month.” A dig at Peter, who, with degrees from both the University of Chicago and Northwestern, was writing the Great American Novel in between moving gigs. To my parents, who measured success—societally, financially—by homeownership, he should have held a steady job, been socking away a down payment.
Our friends bought. They immediately altered their purchase, like dogs marking bushes, peeing, ‘mine.’ The gnarlier the transformation—think a one-bath home with moldy tiles, rust-stained sink, and a no-show contractor, morphing into architectural magazine material—the cockier our friends became, the renovation a gold star of success. Friday nights shifted from shit-faced blowouts to sober conversations sourcing hardware stores and tradesmen, with deep dives into Saturday’s project.
Except us. Saturdays, we slept in, ate Dutch apple pancakes at the corner diner, penned in answers to the Times’ crossword.
When we moved to Tucson for graduate school, we caved. We had no choice. We couldn’t find a rental that accepted two cats and a Labrador retriever, my mother-in-law’s dog we fostered while she lived in government housing on the Navajo Nation, working as a midwife. When I asked how she afforded to give us a down payment, when my parents could but wouldn’t, Peter said, “She dug into her retirement so Skippy wouldn’t land in the shelter.”
There we were, Saturdays, at the hardware store talking projects.
Weekends and vacations we refinished oak floors, peeled floral wallpaper, set flagstone patios, glued glow-in-the-dark stars on the second bedroom’s ceiling for baby Lyda. To my chagrin, I liked hardware stores. Liked the Zen-calm of paint strokes. Liked melding fragments. Found comfort in the familiar.
◊ ◊ ◊
“I don’t know how to do this,” I said the year following Lyda’s birth. I stood next to Bill, the professor I had studied with while earning a PhD in wildlife ecology, in a parking lot. We had met with middle-aged men who planned to transform 640 pristine desert acres with perennial springs, an Arizona rarity, into condos and a water-thirsty golf course. The permit required they hire a biological monitor—possibly me—to verify they followed rules: preserved springs, transplanted saguaro cacti, scraped raw designated areas.
My cluelessness applied to more than my understanding of the job.
“I don’t know how to do this,” I had said when Peter’s cough never coughed up anything. Said after doctors uttered “bizarre” to describe his cancerous blob-pocked lungs. Said as I whirled a blender stuffed with antioxidants: kale, carrots, blueberries. Said after Peter declined treatment. Said for fifteen weeks, from first dry cough until his last.
“Me, either,” Bill said, leaning against his car. “But they don’t know that. So wing it.”
This I was doing.
◊ ◊ ◊
Three months later, on a hot August afternoon, a desert tortoise ambled across our patio. Two-year-old Lyda and I squatted alongside. The female thumped her plastron to the flagstone, retracted stumpy legs so only claws protruded. She was scared.
At the golf course site, I had walked in front of bulldozers as blades destroyed prickly-pear, brittlebush, mesquite, and everything else. I rescued snakes, Gila monsters, tortoises, whatever couldn’t scamper from death’s maw. Some I re-homed to adjacent protected lands, some to environmental centers. Two tortoises came home with me.
With Lyda’s chunky fingers wrapped in my palm, we touched the reptile’s ribbed shell.
“Tortoise,” I said.
She traced the animal’s brownish-green scales. Lyda hadn’t spoken since Peter died and wouldn’t for another year.
Our world, like the tortoise’s, had been upended.
Nights I sobbed. Days I yelled at bulldozers, doubled-downing on grading limit adherence. Ten years I shouted, until the developer cringed at my approaching truck’s engine, until Lyda became a middle-schooler, until I rewrote local ordinances for native plant restoration, standing up in county hearings saying, “I know how to do this.”
◊ ◊ ◊
After Peter died, I removed his name from the Martin Avenue house mortgage and title. That year, according to the US Census, I was part of 22 percent of homeowners who were female. Only one percent were in my age bracket: thirty to thirty-four year olds. Membership in this club offered no influence with how I was treated, unlike the one percent of wealth holders, primarily men like the golf course developers, for whom doors opened as they approached.
◊ ◊ ◊
Lyda ran toward the slide, bypassing a gift-jumbled picnic table. We were late to the party. She clambered up metal stairs and threw herself headfirst down the slide, shooting from the bottom, landing on her stomach in playground sand.
“Don’t you worry she’ll hurt herself?” Leslie, the birthday boy’s mom asked. “I won’t let Josh go down by himself.”
There were worse things than a skinned tummy. “What can I help with?” I asked.
Leslie handed me a bag of grapes. “They’re washed.” She pointed to a plate. “No need to cut them. Just put them out whole. Can’t believe the group’s turning five and we don’t have to guard against choking anymore.” She pointed to hot dogs, ready for the grill her husband tended.
The group was our baby group, four women who’d met during birthing classes and since gathered monthly.
“There’s popcorn, too,” Maria said. “They can eat those scary things now.” She touched her neck, gasped.
I’d forgotten Lyda’s small esophagus. Amazing she had survived thus far. What other safeguards had eluded me?
“Shed OK?” Jim, a dad, asked.
“Should be,” Emily, his wife, said, ripping open a bag of buns. “He spent forever putting it together.”
Last weekend, Jim had assembled almost all the shelving for my new shed. Almost, because Emily had called Jim three times, finally insisting he come home.
“Would you mind taking these to the grill?” She handed me the buns and gestured toward Leslie’s husband. “This baby’s kicking like mad.” She rubbed her pregnant belly.
“Don’t mind her,” Leslie whispered in my ear. “She’s crabby because she’s tired.”
Emily was crabby because she worried I might have an affair with Jim. Since Peter died, married girlfriends grew territorial when I asked if I could borrow husbands for projects, although I’d borrowed them before Peter died.
“Are those on your honey-wheat?” I asked. Peanut butter and strawberry jam oozed from triangle-shaped sandwiches.
“How’d you know?”
When Peter was sick, Leslie had dropped off a honey-wheat loaf, oven warm, Monday afternoons. The Monday after his memorial service, she’d called to say she wouldn’t stop by. “The bread was to help Peter feel better,” she answered when I asked why. I wanted to say it was me who ate the bread. Me who felt better, as in not hungry.
“And, now….” She had not finished the sentence.
Others, too, ignored Peter’s demise. Perhaps they thought talking about him would upset me, as if I’d forgotten he was dead, or his death was a reminder of their mortality, or they didn’t have the skills to handle a peer ravaged by bulldozer-aggressive cancer. When I tried to say how I felt, girlfriends looked away, chatted about their kids, dinner, playdates.
A gaping wound of invisible oozing blood was how I felt.
“A chasm reaching to my core,” I said in my grief-support group. “Punching through my innards, blood splattering everywhere.”
“Exactly,” a group member said.
“Some days I only eat potato chips,” another added. “Hide in bed.”
“I feel like a tortoise withdrawing into its shell,” I had said. “Stuffing my feelings because nobody can deal with them. I can’t deal with them.”
At the picnic table, Lyda gobbled sandwiches.
“She’s going through a growth spurt,” Maria said, as Lyda grabbed a handful of Cheetos. Watching her lips turn fluorescent orange, I realized that we’d skipped lunch.
Leslie brought the cake forth and her husband lit candles. Jim, with son on lap, clapped the boy’s hands as we sang him “Happy Birthday.” Maria’s husband hoisted their daughter onto his shoulders. One dad cut the cake, another passed plates. Emily leaned into Jim as he snugged an arm around her shoulder.
My invisible wound gaped wider than Lyda’s mouth stuffing Cheetos. I couldn’t be around dads playing with kids, wives interacting with husbands, or the mechanizations of unfragmented families.
“We gotta go,” I said, wiping yellow dye, surely carcinogenic, from Lyda’s lips.
I was failing her. I yanked her from friends. I missed meals. I forgot choking hazards. I had failed Peter, too. I couldn’t stop cancer’s spread. I couldn’t stay past an hour while he languished in the hospital. I couldn’t talk to him about dying. When I did muster the resolve to, he no longer talked.
I excelled in one area: saving the desert. The desert was a victim of circumstance, like Peter had been, like I was.
◊ ◊ ◊
In a 2010 Federal Register issue, the government’s official communication, agency scientists responded to the petition to list the desert tortoise as a threatened species. They agreed with the petitioners that habitat loss and subsequent fragmentation was the reptile’s biggest threat. With the 2000s housing boom, desert had been bladed to develop golf courses, houses, roads, strip malls. Given the ongoing increase in Arizona’s population, without federal protection, the agency concluded, the Sonoran desert tortoise was in danger of extinction within all or a significant portion of its range. But the government hesitated offering a lifeline, requested more data, more analysis.
My backyard tortoises were elusive. During cool months they hibernated. During blast-furnace hot months they foraged. Early evenings, they buried heads in flowers and paused as though sniffing blossoms. When summer monsoon rains blew in, the reptiles hunkered on flagstone, siphoning puddle water with tongues as the downpour pummeled their chunky legs.
Lyda carted them to school for show-and-tell. She told about me risking my life to save the tortoises. Friends gifted me tortoise-motif earrings, necklaces; gifted Lyda hand puppets, stuffed animals. A tortoise reigned on my business cards and letterhead.
“I’d change your logo,” a man wearing a sports jacket and ironed khakis, a potential customer, said as he studied my card during a golf course trade show. “They’re slow and stupid.”
“But they won the race,” I countered. “Remember the tortoise and hare fable? The tortoise overcame all obstacles and finished.”
“I prefer a swift rabbit handle my environmental permitting. The whole point is to build my dream course, not save weeds.” He returned my card. “Change your logo, you’ll go farther,” he said, walking away.
I stood in the cavernous convention center, among hawkers of industrial mowers, emerald turf samples, bags of fertilizer and herbicides and pesticides, and photos of shiny yellow bulldozers ripping and tearing. Surrounded by tools of destruction, I wanted no part in altering wildness so others could build their dream. I left the meet-and-greet and canvassed municipalities to restore greenspace.
◊ ◊ ◊
David, a university professor, divorced (the week prior) with grown kids, was nearly a decade older. He threw Robert Burns parties where everyone wrote lascivious poetry and drank. He talked politics. He loved rhubarb and candied ginger. He roasted bitter Brussels sprouts into buttery yumminess. He didn’t feel sorry for me, and I liked that about him.
On our first date, I looked past his four drinks. On our second date, I looked past him blaming his prior wife (of twenty-four years) for him not becoming departmental head. On our third date, I looked past his presumptuousness that we’d honeymoon in Paris.
I leaned into remarrying. Not for a man, because husbands were work. But to redeem myself, which was an unsettling feeling. Sure, among my mother’s peers marrying was the way to go, but for me? I told girlfriends to lose sorry-assed men. “You’re better off single,” I’d say. But I had spoken from the hubris of being married to Peter. As a widow, I felt defeated. Marriage would surely make me whole.
On our honeymoon, I looked past David forgetting Paris because we were in Italy.
Giddy, I flashed a sapphire and gold band, proof I was superior wife material and no longer a failure. I accompanied him to conferences: San Diego, London, Lima, Sydney, Banff. Days, David lectured and I went sightseeing; nights, we attended banquets. I sat with other dressed-to-the-nine wives and chatted about kids and Target bargains. Our husbands discussed research. No one asked about my work. I tried talking about conservation but my lead-ins were met with, “How nice,” as if I was stupid.
I embraced trophyhood until Banff. In the Canadian Rockies, we skied after his lectures, but David hit the moguls and I closed my eyes on the bunny hill. The banquet conversations bored me. Loneliness draped my shoulders, a companion I thought I’d never feel again. I wanted the marriage to work, but being a man’s arm candy felt wrong. Surely, David would engage more if we worked on a project together, like my parents had, like Peter and I had.
I searched for a house, with room for a baby. Learning David had maxed out his credit cards and held no equity in the house he’d just sold, we bought a fixer-upper on Oasis Drive. The house was a project—termites, cracked windows, dead trees. After the closing, when I thought we’d huddle over plans, David planned a conference in France. When I said I wouldn’t go, he ignored me for a week. Oasis Drive became the perfect distraction from wondering if my marriage had been a good decision.
◊ ◊ ◊
Reaching across his desk, the commercial banker pointed to the bottom of my loan application. “You’re missing your husband’s signature,” he said. I had landed a contract to survey for an endangered owl. To cover payroll before I was paid, I needed a line of credit.
“David doesn’t own my company,” I said. “We have a prenuptial agreement saying so.” We’d been married less than a year. The prenup had been my accountant’s idea. Louis had said that I’d be foolish not to, and to include the house on Martin Avenue because “you just never know.” Since Peter’s death I heeded advice that included those words.
“We’ll need your husband’s signature.” The banker said, tapping the application.
I showed him the contract. “It’s with the government,” I said. “They won’t renege.”
But he insisted, as if David was the financially stable one of us, a sexist assumption since his credit score was lower than mine. Since I wouldn’t intermingle David with my company, the banker said he needed more data before he could offer a lifeline, the same excuse government scientists had used to withhold preservation tools from tortoises. Ultimately, underwriters required the Martin house as collateral. Tortoises only had their lives to offer in exchange for help.
◊ ◊ ◊
The state of our Rotunda house was a metaphor for our marriage: a mess. David yearned to rush to renovation’s end with a sumptuous party while I uncovered more rotten bits to shore up. He was right, I procrastinated. But making a home took time. And, I preferred painting the girls’ bedrooms the right hue—papaya pink for happy-go-lucky Ava and moss green for science-minded Lyda—over hosting an open house.
One year into marriage, his assistant, introducing herself as his office wife, said David had changed for the better. “He thought of himself as a loser after his first wife left him.” His assistant was happier, too. “No more arranging pet sitting, dry cleaning, or travel. He’s too important to do those things.”
Two years in, Lyda refused to call David dad and I refused to pick up dry cleaning.
Three years in, the contractor wondered if I was still married.
Four years in, Lyda’s middle-school principal called. “She’s having trouble with authority figures,” he said.
Five years in, David refused to talk to Lyda unless she called him dad.
Six years in, David talked only to Ava.
Seven years in, the marriage counselor fired us. “You have too much work to do,” she said. “And, neither of you wants to do it.”
Seven and a half years in, Lyda said, “You need to do something. You need to leave.” I was too cowardly. Divorce meant failure. Staying, though, meant I would fail my daughter.
Eight years in, I took Lyda for tacos when he filed for divorce. “Can we afford these?” she asked, salsa dribbling from her chin.
Eight and a half years in, a judge ordered David to vacate our home. I stared at him storming from the courtroom. I shouldn’t have winked.
◊ ◊ ◊
“I deserve half of the Martin property’s equity,” David said at our settlement in the conference room with the sad-looking fig. “I paid for its upkeep while we lived there.”
I pressed my hand’s heel into my jumpy thigh and looked to my lawyer.
She raised an eyebrow, picked up a pencil.
David’s lawyer turned a page of her legal pad.
The judge pro tem clicked a pen.
My leg twitched more.
All stared at me, four pairs of eyes.
I kept mine off David, so as not to slap the smirk from his face. His endgame was to even the score for humiliating him in court. Showing malice, though, would backfire. Stick with facts, my lawyer had advised, and stuff your emotions. I excelled at stuffing.
I stared at the fig in the corner. “He signed a prenup. Martin isn’t his.” I hoped my voice did not quiver like my leg. “In the six years we lived there, what money David paid was rent…”
I drilled into those yellowed leaves. I grew tall. Loud. Mad. I was infuriated no one had watered the plant. Enraged no one noticed it. Livid no one offered aid in its struggle to succeed.
From my memory of talking with Louis, I dredged up accounting parlance. Louis had cautioned me against selling the Martin house during my second marriage as any proceeds would be David’s too, Arizona being a community property state.
After I spewed my accounting guts, I stilled. Silence grew louder than my words. I glanced to my lawyer, to see how my argument landed, but she stared at the judge pro tem.
“Well, that’s settled,” the judge said. “Lisa keeps the house.”
I tamped down my triumph so David wouldn’t retaliate further.
◊ ◊ ◊
Rotunda’s new mortgage terms sucked: a variable rate with a balloon, meaning increasing payments with refinance in five years. Our divorce agreement’s deadline neared and these were the best terms I’d found.
“Before, we had a thirty-year fixed with lower payments,” I said to the loan officer.
“Based upon your circumstances,” she said, “this is what underwriters approved.”
I had dithered about what status to check: single, married, divorced, widowed. Divorced worked. Widowed, too. Was the answer how the last relationship ended or how I felt? Divorced granted David continued influence. Yet, widowhood’s wound had scabbed over. I checked “Single” and underwriters penalized my uncoupledness.
I could sell the Rotunda house. But we had moved in last year after spending six renovating. Retreating to Martin felt like backsliding. Gut-twisting, too, was the housing market’s free fall. Values for both might tumble below their mortgages. It was 2008, the beginning of the Great Recession. The housing crisis epicenter, Arizona’s foreclosures leapt into the stratosphere, with people out on the streets. I didn’t know which would be worse: David’s taunting that I “had to sell” coming true or homelessness.
◊ ◊ ◊
I had to rent one. Closer to the university, Martin was more desirable. But I fretted about renters scratching the floor Peter had refinished, killing the acacia tree Lyda had helped plant to honor her dad, peeling stars from Lyda’s ceiling. Midwinter I listed Martin on vacation home websites and hoped guests would spend more time out than in.
Beautiful house. Lots of artistic touches throughout. The fenced-in yard
included a lovely garden and patio with a bench for relaxing. What a
surprise to find tortoises! Highly recommend! Maureen from MN.
Five-star ratings I sucked on like peppermint, rolled guests’ words around in my mouth until I strained all their sweetness.
Your cable doesn’t work; your bathroom door doesn’t shut or lock,
there are biting bugs outside, a dude slept in the alley, the door
facing the fountain outside doesn’t lock, the fountain worked and
then it quit and you need to make a new en-suite bathroom for
the master—and your washer takes too long to fill with water.
Other than that, we were very comfortable. Mary from WI.
“Don’t sell, Mom,” Lyda said. “That’s where Dad is.”
She was right. If I sold, Peter’s presence in our lives, in this world, would diminish. Selling would be his erasure. I dug in, hand-wrote welcome notes; stocked the patio with a grill and charcoal, and the pantry with coffee and teas; added plush pillows, shampoo, conditioner. When I earned super-host status, I felt like I’d earned a gold medal.
◊ ◊ ◊
I never named the reptiles. Naming them would have changed their status to pet, relegated them to the likes of a fiddle-leaf fig which in its rainforest habitat reaches majestic heights, but in a conference room grows stunted. The tortoises weren’t objects to be gawked at like my emerald ring or me as David’s wife. They, like me, held value. The tortoises weren’t symbols of my career any more than I was of David’s.
While David replaced me with a third wife, I replaced aloneness with labor. I crafted burrows from cinderblock, mounded berms to prevent flooding during winter’s hibernation. With this marriage’s ending, I felt no blood-spurting wound. I did not cry; I breathed.
On the day blades upended their existence, I had expected the tortoises to meld their lives to mine, like David had expected me to accessorize his. Now, I planted native vegetation: globe mallow, Ajo lily, evening primrose, cheeseweed. I canvassed roadsides for ripe prickly-pear fruit. Pinkish-red juice stained the reptiles’ mouths and forelegs, as if they wore lipstick and crimson high heels. The tortoises thrived on their terms.
Friends were surprised when I spoke about hosting.
“You have another house?” they asked, their concept of a single mother poverty-skewed.
I pitched my story to a magazine editor, a first-hand account of the gig economy.
“I’m not wrapping my head around two houses,” she responded via email. “Readers won’t believe you. Even if it’s so, it’s too privileged, so I’m passing.”
I did not feel privileged for scouring toilets after football tailgates, retrieving beer cans tossed into the hedge, or scrubbing charred egg from pans left in the sink. I stopped talking about Martin, about the gig economy, about being anything other than a single mom of two daughters driving a 2005 Toyota sedan and wearing thrift-store finds. I was on my own.
Wild tortoises weren’t better off. Years after WildEarth Guardians and Western Watersheds Project petitioned for Endangered Species Act protection, the government decided the Sonoran desert tortoise didn’t warrant federal involvement after all, a politically motivated decision based upon the prevailing party’s ethos. The lid of conservation’s toolbox snapped shut.
Arizona offered the reptile protection as a “Species of Greatest Conservation Need,” prohibiting collection of wild individuals from state-owned land. Otherwise, the tortoise had to fend for itself.
◊ ◊ ◊
In 2017, JP Morgan Chase informed me, “After your next mortgage payment your loan balance will be zero. Your deed to your Martin Avenue house will be forthcoming thereafter.” I was giddier than when I flashed my emerald ring. Against odds, I was whole. That year, the US Census estimated 24 percent of homes were owned by women. According to Zillow, 37 percent of homeowners owned outright. Thus, less than 9 percent of homes were owned outright by women. Using the same parameters of determining protective status under the Endangered Species Act, endangered status would have been bestowed to women homeowners, with the government offering tools for us to thrive.
I wanted to tell David that I flourished without him. But we didn’t talk.
I wanted to tell the editor that my story was true, that I was relevant. But she had shut her door.
I told Louis. He had culled spreadsheets, certified IRS letters, receipts. Louis had offered me chocolate and tissues through death, divorce, refinancing.
“Pretty good, right?” I waved the deed, proof I was no failure.
Louis clinked his metal water bottle against mine. “Kudos. You figured out a way.”
I wanted to linger and relish success, like my tortoises savored prickly pear, but I had a welcome note to leave for guests, Ava to pick up, and Louis charged by the hour. I handed him an accordion file filled with papers, many on letterhead that featured a tortoise.
Lisa K. Harris (she/her), a Pushcart Prize nominated author, has published in Orion Magazine, Passages North, Highlights for Children, Litro Magazine, and (M)othering (edited by Sorbie and Grogan, 2022), among others. Her work has been supported by the Bread Loaf Environmental Writers’ Conference. Migrating between Seattle and Tucson working as an environmental consultant, she has two daughters, six cats, two desert tortoises, and a terrier named Lola. Find her @harrislisakim and at lisakharris.com.
