June 12, 2014 / A Distant Quiet
It’s very noisy here right now. They are tearing up all the streets around our house, and the staccato roar of the tearing-up machine crowds the air. The neighborhood kids have a great new toy in the yard at the house behind ours: what do you call it? a bouncy castle or some such? Anyhow,… Read More
June 04, 2014 / Tiananmen Square: 25 Years
On June 4, 1989 I was in a small town in New Hampshire, where I had been invited to lead several days of workshops for the town’s teachers. The folks there put me up in a little motel, to which I gratefully retired after the first day’s work. I ordered out for pizza and while I was… Read More
June 04, 2014 / Street Dancers
This story is a bookend with Closer To Home #20 - Street Pianos. So every year Boston hosts Celebrity Series, which offers up a marvelously-varied array of performances. A few months ago my husband and I, subscribers to the series, saw a sort of boutique circus from Australia, followed a week… Read More
May 22, 2014 / Rain Travel
Plesiosaurs swam in my tears. Jesus, or his mother, or Buddha, or Mohammed, turned their faces up to some of this same rain. So did Genghis Khan, or his henchies, and a shaman the painter of visions in Lascaux. Probably they took shelter from it. Parts of bergy bits floating in the Southern Ocean… Read More
May 19, 2014 / A Cuban Sees Snow
So we have a visitor from Cuba, a person I met on my trip there in 2008. He arrived somewhat precipitously; the tortuous process of obtaining the precious visa to visit the United States lurched in fits, stops and starts and finally produced the visa stamp in his passport without much warning.… Read More
April 29, 2014 / Not My Tribe
Travel is supposed to be broadening. In my very early days as a traveler, naïve thing that I was, I learned how insular I was. I remember three times when I desperately missed my tribe. There I was, in 1963, in the Soviet Union, my very first trip out of my own country. My Mother,… Read More
April 27, 2014 / The Reenactment at Lexington Green
It’s Patriots’ Day in Massachusetts. “…the 18th of April in ’75.” I’d set the alarm for 3:45 a.m., but I woke up about 3:15—you know how it is, like having to get up really early to catch a flight, and hardly sleeping at all so as not to be late.… Read More
April 18, 2014 / Keeping Up To Date
It seems hardly a day passes without some horrific news of disaster. Here in the Boston area we have just marked the one year that has passed since the Marathon bombings. Recently an entire 777 aircraft vanished with all souls onboard, apparently into thin air. Yesterday a ferry sank, carrying… Read More
April 10, 2014 / Salamanders’ Big Night in the Cemetery (not)
Yesterday afternoon I got an email from Mount Auburn Cemetery, where I volunteer. “It’s the first warm and rainy day of spring. The salamanders in our vernal pool might be having their Big Night tonight. Come at 7:30 and we’ll go see.” What? Salamander Big Night? Vernal… Read More
April 08, 2014 / Happy Birthday, Hilary’s Places!
A whole year has passed since my website went live on March 29, 2013. Oh, it was such a long time in the conception and gestation and birth. For years I had kept journals and made images when on travel. The first really big journal I wrote by hand, in East Africa, in 1980. Those were hot places… Read More