Is this Patagonian journey going to turn out as wonderful as I imagine? That’s the question I’m asking myself as we sit in a seedy bus station, waiting to start our long-awaited trip to the bottom of the world. It all began more than 35 years ago when older friends left their three daughters with…
If you believe that the old-fashioned Christmas villages of holiday prints never existed outside of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Norman Rockwell calendars, and vintage Christmas cards, then surprise! You never visited the little town in Maine where I grew up in the 1960’s. In some ways, it was just like the postcards. After my cousin…
The Republic of Chile’s national anthem trumpets a hymn of praise to the country’s stunning pastoral beauty—boasting blue skies, pure breezes, and fields bordered with flowers. This “happy copy of Eden” lies cradled between its God-given bulwark of majestic white mountains and the tranquil sea that bathes its coasts and promises future splendor. Dulce patria……
“I write on my knees,” said Gabriela Mistral, as cited at the museum in Vicuña, Chile, that honors her life and legacy. So do I—that’s how we write. But why do we writers write? The Chilean poet and Nobel laureate meant that she preferred scribbling in a notebook on her lap as opposed to writing…
During the seemingly endless decade when I was a homeschooling mom, I secretly had only one basic goal: to convince my girls to love books. So why is it we readers read? And why push reading with a passion? Clearly prejudiced, I had to give a nod to mathematics as a boring-but-necessary blot on the…
