We are sitting on wickedly reclining wooden chairs with our feet in the fine white sand. We are different now. Opposite is our brand new compatriot grinning and plying us shamelessly with margaritas on the rocks with salt. The brazen July sun is setting over a lazy Caribbean. Our Caribb… Read full post »

 I seldom venture from the Parklane Hotel here in Dongguan. It’s grand enough to take it personally. The surrounding avenues and architecture are monumental, a person could get lost crossing the road. So I am reluctant, you understand. And I normally arrive late on a muggy southern China n… Read full post »

I say unto you --I had to do this as an exercise years ago, and it was grave fun. What have you to say, my flock? Do we have any spontaneous sermonettes to add?

“You have heard it said that it is a good and worthy thing to volunteer for… Read full post »

Try this for a moment. Using your impeccable cellular memory, close your eyes and arrange your face into a scared expression, an angry one, even hating. Don’t get caught up in your mind’s idea of some sort of story that should go with the expression. Just wear it like you were… Read full post »

Kill the babies

My father said.

By that he meant,

Not the fresh, blush,

Flesh of newborns.

But the torrent

Of exuberant words,

When one

Would

Do.

Why overflow

He said.

When flow,

Alone,… Read full post »

Almost freezing,

That’s one degree centigrade.

Just the one.

In the dry creek bed,

Something round,

Shock-orange.

Not the sun,

Fallen.

A perfect pumpkin,

Ghost of Halloween past.

Above, in the

Charcoal sketch

Cottonwood,

An owl… Read full post »

(Response to OS Open Call On "Tell Us About Your Con")

The thing is I'd always been such a good girl. Without the help of any religious dogma my sisters and I had been taught that you simply told the truth. It was the ethical thing to do. 

In the end… Read full post »

Well, what can you do with an island? It just floats there wanting nothing much from you. It’s possible it doesn’t even need you, that’s how unequal the relationship is. If it shrugged you’d fall in the sea. But if it’s a small one, like Cheung Chau, there are edges ever… Read full post »

Perhaps it’s the absence of direct sunshine, the oblique, halfhearted way the frail light falls that makes this island seem ephemeral as a bubble, seem to float in and out of focus like a mirage on the opaque waters of the vast Pearl River Delta.

I posted this thousands of years ago...before there were comments. Then today, out of the blue, comes the response to end all responses. Maybe.

Repost below with comment included:

What Weight Problem?

I can influence any scale to do as I want. It worries me. What suffers is mutual respect; a… Read full post »

I’ve never been to Montreal before. I had planned many things. I had not expected to be worried about basics, Montreal is about so much more than basics. I thought I had those covered. Here we were, a touch of France on the northern continent of the Americas, such a charming… Read full post »

I was enjoying a leisurely bath, reclining in the warm wet, staring out the window at the innocent green of the Ash tree. This time last year a sudden storm froze out the gentle letting go of fall and rolled in a premature shock of winter. In one icy day everything… Read full post »

I leave home because I am lost and I expect to find myself somewhere else as I am not here. And I look and I look, everywhere, and I still can’t find myself. Even on the other side of the planet, I cannot find myself.

I must be looking in all… Read full post »

    The fire this evening

Labor day. I cannot even recall what it means here in this country, but today it seems ominous.

The day began with an irascible, howling wind and a fire up Fourmile Canyon. The sky over the mountains released a plume of shocked white smoke expanding… Read full post »

This is a shameless wander down memory lane. When we first arrived in the States we bought a business on the Main Street in Longmont, Colorado.

We didn’t want to live in Longmont, we wanted to live in the foothills in Boulder. About ten miles closer to the Rockies, Boulder… Read full post »

Something small and wet (Washington Square).

There are two vastly different ways to buy a sari, maybe more, but as foreigners in Singapore, there are two: In a posh store where the silk is diaphanous and the dollars several hundred; or at the covered market where the selection is vast and the prices less voracious.… Read full post »

I don’t know who else is lonely at home looking for wholesome love in all the right ‘places’ – ‘I mean in every spot’-- while their husbands travel abroad. My husband travels a lot and sometimes I don’t accompany him.

This appears to have triggered a respons… Read full post »