Free The Language of Sisters by Cathy Lamb

University of Oregon, then earned a master’s in journalism at Columbia. I started working for the Oregon Standard when I was twenty-five years old.
    At first I wrote obituaries. That bored me to death. What a way to put it. I started looking for human interest stories to throw at one of the senior editors, William.
    I found a homeless teenager and wrote about him and his life, why he was on the streets, why he’d meddled in drugs, what his hopes and dreams were. “I know I can be someone. I just need help,” he told me. The story got him help. Counseling. An apartment. A job. A scholarship for community college.
    I found a woman who was transgender, man to woman, and wrote about her. She was a biologist. “When I was three years old I refused to wear swim trunks. I wore a bikini, like all the other little girls. I tried to pull off my penis when I was five.”
    I found a man who fought in Vietnam and worked as a peace activist. He told his war stories, wrapped around his belief that war was never an answer. “Once you’ve seen a man destroyed by shrapnel and you hold him in your arms as he dies, you know that war doesn’t solve a damn thing. It makes all of us worse.”
    William loved the human interest angle of the stories. He grunted, edited; we worked on them together. I didn’t have to write obituaries anymore.
    I like truth. It stems from my childhood, particularly from my mother. Professors, doctors, musicians, journalists, writers, and artists, and my uncles and aunts, bringing my cousins with them, all crowded into our apartment in Moscow.
    They ate my mother’s chopped herring salad, or fried potatoes with what few eggs she could find that day, while she and my father talked about freedom of speech, religion, press, the right to protest, a fair judicial system. They were adamant that a free press was the pillar of a free society, and they were vociferous in their belief that they should be able to worship, as Christians, in the open, with no fear.
    â€œNo religious freedom, you smother the soul. No freedom to vote, you suffocate and endanger your population. No free press, no truth,” my mother would say, as people nodded. “When the government controls the press, they smother reality.”
    I exposed the truth. I loved journalism. I loved writing. I loved the awards I now and then won for my longer, more in-depth pieces.
    I do not love it anymore.
    I work long, harsh hours, as one cannot predict when crime will occur. Criminals do not schedule their criminal activity with me. Full moons are bad nights. Heat waves are grueling. Gangs pissed off at each other as leadership shifts are a mess. Wives leaving controlling, narcissistic husbands might mean I’m up at two in the morning as they take off running ... and so do their tormentors.
    The crime and justice beat is all negative, all the time. It’s senseless. Whenever someone says to me, a pious note to their voice, “I believe that everything happens for a reason,” I see an incredibly naïve and shallow person who has no idea what’s going on outside her front door.
    A woman named Ricki Adelman is the editor for Homes and Gardens of Oregon . I have heard nothing about my application. I would love writing about homes. Why?
    Because it all ends happy. Someone gets a remodeled kitchen with handles in the shapes of teacups on their cabinets. Someone else repaints an old dresser red and adds a Picasso-type design. A living room wall is decorated with reclaimed wood from a barn.
    If I don’t get the job, I’m leaving. I will have a nervous breakdown if I don’t.
    * * *
    To keep my nervous breakdown at bay, I indulged in Keeping The Monsters At Bay: Shopping Defensive Strategies after work. I bought a pair of pink tennis shoes and red skinny jeans. That night I made peanut butter cookies and ate them in my bathtub. I put a glass of milk on the rim of the tub and accidentally dumped