Is it worth it, leaving the island? No. Emphatically no. If you can’t find what you need on the island, which means if you can’t find it at the grocery store, the drugstore, the hardware store, the consignment furniture store, the consignment clothing boutique, a yard sale or, better yet, at the Exchange, where even rich people poke around in garbage, you don’t need it. Because I promise
nside the white mini bus. Twelve seats, all facing Dakar’s cacophony of human wanderings, roadside. Lemons, oranges, bananas. Cloth dolls and fabric passport-purses balanced in flat baskets on heads of moving women swathed in vibrant prints. Upholstered sofas wrapped in plastic for outside sales. Pens of goats awaiting slaughter—Mrs. Camara’s dinner. Fathers, mothers,
A washed-out sign leaning into a ditch informed me I was “Entering Whiting.” I was driving north on Vermont Route 30. The year was 1992. Clapboard farmhouses and towering feed silos dotted the sprawling fields. The horizon burned in brilliant blotches of red and
“I feel like a princess,” was my reaction to life on board an ocean liner from Rotterdam to New York. It was July 1951. I was twenty-seven. I came to the U.S. with other Dutch “Fulbrighters” for a year of graduate study. To prepare us for academic life we spent the
New love is a form of madness. MRIs have proven that the brains of new lovers light up in the exact same area as those of people suffering from obsessive compulsive disorders. I read this in a weekly news magazine a few years ago, put out just in time for