1933: The year Adolf Hitler is given emergency powers.
1933 it says on a photograph in my red leather-bound album. I lived in a small town in Fryslan, a northern Dutch province. For myself and for nineteen other nine-year-old girls it was the year that the town’s photographer came to snap a picture of our singing class,
Continue reading… "War and Flowers"A mild insanity has taken hold of me lately: an obsession with beaches. Warm, sunny beaches. Warm, salty oceans. I fantasize about snorkeling over a reef confettied with bright tropical fish, or walking barefoot in the sand somewhere, anywhere, my pant legs rolled up, friendly wavelets fizzing around my ankles. I stand in front of the tropical fish tanks at a big
Continue reading… "In the Arms of the Ocean"A last look round the house – picked up the jar of flowers Celia had brought: deep red sweet williams and blue verbena. Down at the dock Lark and Corrie came with Peri, Sarah’s friend who was coming up to Ketchikan with us. Corrie brought dinner for our first night out, made by a group of friends: cold chicken, bread and salad. Kai, Vilina and David came down, with
Continue reading… "Fishing Log"I am albino. Albinism is a recessive genetic condition characterized by lack of pigment and legal blindness. My skin and hair are paler than pale, and my eyes are a translucent blue that sometimes looks red in the light. Since albinism is recessive, I’m the only one in my family with the condition.
Continue reading… "Warding Off Eclipses"First she was Steamboat Pottery. Then Redwing Pottery. Now it’s just Nancy Bingham and a business card with a graphic of a pair of hands. A potter for forty of her fifty-eight years, Nancy says, “My hands are my best sense organ. I feel an amazing amount of stuff. I live in my hands.”
Continue reading… "Living in Her Hands"The world, as I know it, changes for me in 1973.
It changes for others in different ways. Richard Nixon is inaugurated to serve a second term as President of the United States of America. Things will soon change drastically for him though because Watergate begins months later. Nixon will submit his resignation the following summer to avoid the insult of impeachment.
Continue reading… "Cloud Creek"It’s quiet in town when I set out for Saint John’s in the Wilderness, which is about a mile down the treacherous road to Lower Dharamsala. But because I’m walking this time, and not hurtling along in impending vehicular catastrophe, I finally get to pay attention to the scenery. It’s a serene, gently treed hillside.
Continue reading… "The Dogs of Dharamsala: On the Trail of the Dalai Lama"I had an aunt who was a violin teacher and, according to family legend, when I was two or three, I’d watch her teaching and then pick up two pieces of wood and “play.” When I was five, she gave me my first lessons, and quickly became excited about my talent.
Continue reading… "Memoirs of a Stupid Woman"I was nineteen years old, returning from a winter in the jungles of Southern Belize, dramatically changed by a foreign climate and culture. On contract as a student of The Evergreen State College of Olympia, Washington, I’d been immersed in studying rainforest natural history and the lives and subsistence strategies of the Kekchi Maya.
Continue reading… "Crow"I hear water music in my sleep: foghorns, and the scratchy voice of a Great Blue Heron, frogs in the marsh. There is the tide as it slides out, then rushes back-the ocean breathing in and out. I dream all the voices in a room filled with people but I can make out only snatches of dialogue, a little blond girl saying, “Change is a fast-moving current,” and a tall, thin professor who explains, “the explicate lies enfolded in the implicate.”
Continue reading… "Acceleration"