Brookland

Daddy, what are nuns?

Well, they are women who devote their lives to God. It means they don’t get married, and they give up things like fancy clothes.

[pause] So they can’t wear booty shorts?

No… [long pause] well, maybe they could, under their robes. Like a secret.

Away from the monuments, Fairy Tales from the Fault Lines is a series of personal dispatches from my life along Washington DC’s shifting central ‘fault lines’, where a gentrifying and long-divided city was forging a new identity as my daughter was growing up. Maybe I just wanted to know if I could love my hometown.