Where There’s Smoke

 
It’s one of the great joys of  my life on the island, to get up with the sun and start smoking something.  Smoking is a multi-hour event, so it’s best to get an early start, although the fact that it’s light at 4:30 in the morning, and broad daylight by 5:30, even though we’re still three [...]

The Taste Of Home

We’ve been eating very well since we’ve been back.  The first week we had insatiable cravings for Mexican food, and that’s almost all we ate.  But now it’s American food that floats our boat, like this lush Copper River salmon, abundant this year and delightfully less expensive than in years past.

I’m rediscovering the joys of smoking, standing out [...]

Sorting It All Out

Back in the day, this jewel of a post office trundled from town to town, a communication center on the rails, gathering information here and depositing it there, helping people stay in touch with all those that were most precious to them, before it rolled on down the line.  I can relate, shuttling from country [...]

Rhapsody In Rhubarb

We’ve only been back a week, but already I’m baking all the time.  In France I practically never baked, for an alphabet of reasons:  a) there was a bakery right next door, b) there were 14 other bakeries in town just in case we needed them, c) French ingredients behave a bit differently and don’t always [...]

Like Proust’s Madeleine

This is the elusive taste of my past.  Thirty years ago this cake was lost to me, the little handwritten recipe for my favorite childhood treat disappearing with the detritus of a relationship gone wrong, after a hasty packing and moving out day that left my entire adulthood thereafter cakeless.  Well, not entirely cakeless, but this [...]

Gobsmacking Timewarp

Nothing’s changed.  And when I say nothing, I mean rien du tout.  It’s very late when we walk into the house, nearly midnight.  The clock has stopped, but when?  At 4:13, yes, I see, but what day?  What month?  What year?  We’ve been gone for 20 months, and time could have stopped at any moment since [...]

From A Moving Train

We’ve been traveling across a small corner of America, clocking 1600 miles, 2575 kilometers, idling away 48 hours, riding two slow trains, peering out countless dirty windows, creeping closer to that place we once called home.

We boarded the train in Green River.  Take my advice and don’t go there without a compelling reason.  That’s the town, [...]

An American Wedding

I’d hate to deceive my French readers, although I’d love to pretend that this was an absolutely typical American wedding.  I’m not saying that grannies with parasols are the quintessence of every American wedding, but there they were yesterday, saving their spot front and center in the desert wedding paradise,

in case the sign didn’t do the trick.  [...]

Bright New World

Fresh from the old world, our eyes are trained to scan the horizon for castles,

towers,

moats and ruins.  And so we see them everywhere here, in these monuments to times long past: majestic, imposing, not formed by centuries of culture and civilization.  This, the raw new world,

crude, powerful, instantly recognizable as the land that shaped us.  I [...]

On The Wing

We spent yesterday in the sky.  No longer in Europe, not yet in the US, for 10 hours and 22 minutes we were nowhere in particular, with no choices to make and our loyalties untorn.

I usually claim to be scared of flying, but yesterday I realized that what really scares me is thinking about flying.  [...]