The fever and rash appeared the day before we were scheduled to get on a 747 from London to New York. Twin 1’s face was a streaky, sickly red except for death-pale stripes around her mouth. I knew what I was looking at, because Twin 2 had just finished the last of her 10-day course […]
Miscellaneous
When I lived in a small town in Colorado, I knew a woman who most people would describe as a hoarder. She made her home in a log cabin not far from a winding river, under ragged cottonwood trees that shed downy tufts in early summer, and showers of gold each autumn. You could see […]
March 26-30 Helen and her co-conspirators created a peep show like none other to start the week. In a menagerie of fossiliferous marshmallowness, they followed the original ichthyosaurus discovery in 1810-11 by Mary Anning on the coast of Southwest England, brilliantly replacing Mary with a marshmallow peep. This will make perfect sense if you see […]
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud by William Wordsworth I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. Continuous as the stars that […]
March 19-23, 2018 Sarah knows so many lovely words, and on Monday, writes about learning even more. When they talked among themselves, they spoke exclusively in Chilean Spanish, which, one of them—Fernando—gravely informed me, is even worse for outsiders than Argentine Spanish. I was awash in a sea of musical sounds whose meanings I could only grasp at […]
Within the last three years, two of my closer university friends have died. I moved away from Toronto a decade ago, and with those moves I was less frequently in touch with my college friends, but I always assumed we could go on picking up where we left off whenever I was in town. In […]
Beginning in April, the Royal London Hospital for Integrated Medicine will no longer be able to provide patients with homeopathic remedies funded by the UK’s taxpayers. This is part of a larger UK crackdown on homeopathy that has gotten underway over the past 18 months. Late in 2016, homeopathy was banned in one of the country’s […]
Most of us probably remember the first word we spoke in our native language. Mine was “Cat,” for I was fascinated by the ornery old Siamese that my parents kept when I was a baby. From there, I’m sure, I learned a child’s standard repertoire: “Mommy,” “Daddy,” “Doggie,” the colors red-yellow-green-blue, and those most basic […]
