Ginger Snapped

An update is long overdue, but it’s taken awhile to get my feet on solid ground—to find a balance between the feeling that we’re-only-here-for-a-year-and-I-must-not-waste-any-time and the sense that if I give in to that, I’ll make myself crazy with either guilt or exhaustion or both. Life is different here, but it’s also exactly the same. The differences? There are small ones like the fact that the toilet is in its own little room with the tiniest sink I have ever seen. The bathroom is across the hall with a bathtub that is lovely and deep, but has no shower curtain. It’s a bit of a splashfest when cleaning up. The washing machine is next to the tub, but we have no clothes dryer, so laundry has to be considered in advance because there’s no quick-dry option. Most days, I carry the laundry up to the roof (er—more like wrangle a flimsy laundry basket around the creaking stairs) and hang it out to dry on a line that the Gingerbread Man rigged up. We also have large wire racks that w...

March Head Wanderlust. Each spring, your mind shifts to Italy, to Roman skies, to marble mosaics, to churches and monuments. You itch to fly away, to see something exotic, to walk upon ancient roads, to breathe in air that has wound its way in and out of spaces for millenia. You check airfares. You check vacation schedules. You think in Italian, in Spanish, in the words of any other language you can conjure up, though not much remains of anything but English. When you were thirteen, your grandparents took your sister and you to England for a summer. It was a celebration of their 40th wedding anniversary, and they let you join in. They rented a flat in Surbiton, Surrey, the upstairs of a beautiful house. It seemed palatial to you, coming from your 900 square foot post-WWII urban home. You lived upstairs from a single mother and her three boys, who must have thought you were terribly American. You suppose you...

“Even   After   All this time The Sun never says to the Earth, "You owe me." Look What happens With a love like that, It lights the whole sky.”   -Hafiz