Every fall, along about November, when winds begin to buffet my brain and scatter its leaves like gold shimmer, I make a trip off-island after long absence from the mainland and buy something stupid. Last year, it was a $36 spatula;
Continue reading… "These Boots"I crawl out of bed, yawning with my whole torso as I pull on my faded red bathrobe. I am twenty-eight years old and living alone in an apartment in Beaverton, Oregon. The complex is nicer than I could have afforded in the Bay Area, with a pool and gymnasium. I still need to find a job if I want to keep it.
Continue reading… "Between Plausibility and Truth"On the first day of this year, I purchased a pair of midnight shoes. These are no island shoes, no hippies-take-‘em-off-at-the-door-protect-the-carpet shoes, chores-to-do shoes, no hitch-to-town-slipper, no drying-off-after-the-beach clog. No, these are the kind of shoes meant to make noise on urban concrete.
Continue reading… "Roadkill Rising"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
Continue reading… "The Spatula"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,
Continue reading… "Dakar, Senegal"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
Continue reading… "Searching for Ichabod: His Eighteenth-Century Diary Leads Me Home"“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
Continue reading… "A Summer of Unfinished Business"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
Continue reading… "Old Love"I am in the midst of a love affair with Montana. I didn’t see it coming, as so often is the case with middle-agers. We drift into these close-to-the-heart relationships and, somewhere along the way, knee deep in delight and longing, we consider radical thoughts
Continue reading… "My Montana"My favorite book when I was eight was the Bobbsey Twins at the Seashore. Into my teen years, the memory of that tale conjured up long stretches of sand whiter than I’d ever seen and enormous, deep blue waves that curled up and over and heaved themselves down onto the shore and out again. I lived in a small town in central Minnesota. There were lakes
Continue reading… "A Northwest Passage"