A windy day
Today was a windy day in Cape Town. People here call the wind the “Cape Doctor” because the wind, when it blows hard, as it often likes to do, takes the dirty air away. Today there was the windy doctor, and clouds poured from the top of the mountain that towers over Cape Town and […]
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 […]
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 […]
Cape Town’s cable car
CAPE TOWN, South Africa—I am a journalist living in Cape Town, South Africa. The writing I do here comes from “listening to the city and its people” and writing down what both have to say. Cape Town could be any city or place. There is no specific reason why I am writing about Cape Town […]
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 […]
Drakensberg
The opera music played from the man’s headphones as he and the woman hiked the gravel road next to a field of wheat. He was not talking to her because he was angry, and also because he liked how his music played as a blue and yellow airplane with a propeller dipped and rose overhead […]