January 12th, 2016 | Gardens and Gardening, General, Memory, Travel, United States, visual arts
Planes roar down from the west, above Balboa Park and I-5, to the runways at Lindbergh Field about every minute or so during the day. The first plane seemed loud but in a familiar way—I did, after all, live here in the 1980s. We woke to a pearly Monday sunrise and the...
July 1st, 2015 | Cooking, Kitchen and Table, Gardens and Gardening, General, the world and Mother Nature
Our grill is no less used that the stove. It produces a perfect roast chicken and keeps the smell of onions out of the house. When red peppers are cheap, we blister a few dozen over the flame and freeze them in olive oil for whenever we need them. And, of course, it...
May 24th, 2015 | Europe, Gardens and Gardening, Matters of the Spirit, Popular Culture, Travel
You think you know what to expect but you really don’t. I had a vision of the Nemunas Loops Regional Park (Nemuno kilpų regioninis parkas) as a sprawling area, a place needing vigorous hiking skills or better yet a car. The park is 25,171 hectares—a quantity that...
May 17th, 2015 | Europe, Gardens and Gardening, Genealogy, General, Matters of the Spirit, Memory, the world and Mother Nature, Time Passes, Travel
It was possibly the best day of the trip. Or maybe not best. Maybe it is the one most firmly nestled into my visual cortex, the collection of images most likely to reappear when I am asked about Lithuania, what I experienced, what I remember. In television programs...
June 28th, 2014 | Gardens and Gardening, Genealogy, General, Memory, Time Passes, Travel, visual arts
This was the branch that most frightened me, the one most perfectly positioned to do irreparable harm to the monument. Lower and smaller branches had already been removed, opening space around the slender column surmounted by its neoclassical urn. Four of us—two on...
March 19th, 2014 | Gardens and Gardening, General, Holidays, Memory, Pets, Time Passes
When I was about twelve or thirteen, I read Sterling North’s Rascal, a memoir of a year during World War One and the raising of a baby raccoon. North was much the youngest of four siblings; his sister Theodora was the practical member of the family and the one who...