When I lived here, a common question that would thread through conversations was one of how long. How long have you been here, and how long are you going to be here. I’d have these conversations with both expats and Ghanaians, and I loved being able to answer the first part in years and the […]
Copy
A few weeks ago, I watched Everything is Copy, a documentary about Nora Ephron by her son, Jacob Bernstein, a New York Times journalist. He probed his mother’s life and her adage that created the title of the doc, the notion that everything, and everyone, in a life is fodder. Ephron’s family, friends and foes […]
The Home Arts
Two things have taken place recently that wouldn’t have been a general possibility — maybe not even a remote likelihood — a year ago. A year ago, when I was still coming down from the terrible, wonderful glee of finishing my thesis, the idea that I could take up a hobby and have a lick […]
Flights of Fancy
It’s been just over a year since I developed a fear of flying. It came on a snowy morning, when I was due at the airport, and there was news of a plane that had crash landed short of the runway the night before. There were no fatalities, no major injuries, but for the first […]
Country Sounds
I’m in a house at the top of long driveway that winds an ice-rutted dirt path up a hill to a place where the trees clear. A batting line-up’s worth of blue jays poke at feeders. The birds grab seeds and fly into the bare branches to crunch through their prize. There are deer prints […]