2023 through a fairy door
I am sitting at a table in a house on a hill somewhere on the California coast. It’s morning, it’s almost the end of 2023, and I can hear my nephew talking. He’s just a year and a half old, and he’s still in his crib. I look outside. It’s gray and it’s raining, and […]
Mozart and the Tour du Mont Blanc
Dispatch Summer 2023 This is my Tour du Mont Blanc journal. The Tour du Mont Blanc (TMB) is a 100-mile loop hike around the Mont Blanc massif in the French, Italian and Swiss Alps. It is not a new hike that I am inventing; I am doing a hike that many others have done and […]
Of flowers and soil
Snapshot 17 July 2023 CAPE TOWN, South Africa—When you start calling yourself a writer there is the imagined expectation that each word you write will be an alchemical mixture of, at the least, sunlight and gold. Sometimes that is the case, but writing is as much about the glittering nuggets made of sunlight and gold […]
A café encounter
Words conjured by sunlight and a mountain in Cape Town. 31 December 2022 CAPE TOWN, South Africa—There was a woman sitting in a window of a café. The woman wore a black tee and she sat hunched over a laptop and an empty plate. Then a man entered the café. He went there because he […]
The Luminaries
The other night there was a parade where people held aloft glowing paper luminaries. There was a swarm of bees, a lone unicorn, and other little and big creatures dancing in the air, hanging from strings at the ends of sticks. Luminaries emerge on just one night of the year in April, when they feel that the dark days of winter […]
Tafelberg
The girl’s grandmother often said to anyone who would listen that the mountain that cradled their town by the sea was not a mountain, but a ship. ‘The side that faces us, that’s her starboard side, and where the starboard side ends over there to the right, that’s her bow.’ She said this to so […]