Eleven years ago today I heard the news on the BBC and then went straight to the television. I saw a tower of the World Trade Center smoking and on fire, and I hoped with some horror that air traffic controllers had made a terrible mistake, and I listened as the newscasters wondered. And then […]
Read moreI had forgotten completely this in the longing for winter—this winter now just past, this winter that wasn’t. Thirty degrees today and sixty tomorrow: I had wished for just one solid week of winter. I worked my favorite puzzle on the coffee table again, the one with the picture covered in snow, the one that […]
Read moreI’ve loved January for a while now. It’s not that I don’t love December and all that those 31 days mean– I do. I love the Christmas tree and the decorations and the lights. And more than that, of course, I love Advent: the awareness of the waiting, the quietness of the birth, the miracle […]
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Once upon a time, I wanted to be Mary. The Santa thing never really took hold in me so much as Mary’s story did, and I would imagine myself to be her: thirteen or so, pregnant, sitting side-saddle on a saddle-less donkey, making my loping way toward Bethlehem. I was a dramatic child, drawn to […]
Read moreHis birthday was the day after Christmas, so we were all home from school. The day was a cold and grey one; I don’t remember if we had snow, but we had that feeling of the day after Christmas: that feeling of it’s being over, the feeling of anticlimax and of all the surprises behind […]
Read moreIn collecting his wife’s diaries for publication, Leonard Woolf wrote, “At the best and even unexpurgated, diaries give a distorted or one-sided portrait of the writer, because, as Virginia Woolf herself remarks somewhere in these diaries, one gets into the habit of recording one particular kind of mood– irritation or misery, say– and of not […]
Read moreDuring the few years we lived in Japan when I was a child, I learned to be afraid of the wind. Some of it was the fault of Jeff, a neighborhood boy one year older than I and a teller of tall tales. But much of it was due to the wind itself. The wind […]
Read moreMy friend and worship minister asked several weeks ago that I write something about Jesus as a man for our advent celebration at church. I was happy to do this, glad to ponder what I have always thought to be a fairly elusive fact: Jesus was a man. That’s all that many people even today […]
Read moreMost of the time I forget all about it. I forget about it in the way that you forget Christmas, or what you had for dinner last Wednesday. I forget about it because it is irrelevant. Most of the time. Most of the time I am up before light, anyway. I make breakfast and bed […]
Read moreCotignac, France Provence has a basically Mediterranean climate, one wafted by winds that give it a special character. The most notorious is the mistral (from the Provencal mistrau, or master– supposedly sent by northerners jealous of the south’s climate), rushing down from the Rhone and gushing east as far as Toulon and west to Narbonne. […]
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