This year we’re celebrating Christmas with our middle daughter in beautiful southern Chile. Since her apartment is small, both decorations and kitchen space will be limited. So, for the first time ever, I decided to pull back a bit myself. I haven’t unpacked much of my Christmas stuff nor spent hours baking this December. But…
Twenty-five years have passed, give or take a few, since I chanced on this little gem for my tin collection. Doing errands in bustling downtown Santiago, I ducked out of the drizzle and smog into a recently discovered “treasure hoard” of a store. Todo A Mil (“Everything for 1000 Pesos”—the Chilean equivalent of a dollar…
So much of my life revolves around food. Purchasing, preparing, eating, and cleaning up food! Even as I start to write this post, my mind wanders to the kitchen and the squash-apple soup I plan to make for lunch. I’m not a great cook or even super passionate about cooking, but I sure love to…
Is anything more exciting to a writer than a new notebook and pen? Or to a child-artist than a fresh box of crayons? The other day while packing, I came across the green-and-yellow tin of 64 Crayola colors. One of my first acquisitions (as a collector not a kid Picasso), today it holds my hot-glue…
Among the many themes in my books, the motif of HOME—or perhaps more precisely, houses—surprises me most with its broad-spectrum presence. I never planned to weave those ideas into the writing, was hardly even aware of them. But in this homesick world, maybe that’s not unexpected at all. Recently I suffered an attack…of nostalgia. Did…
After viewing my constantly growing collection of kitchen tins, a church friend in Coquimbo mentioned (with a smirk) that he’d seen me on TV—some program about hoarders? Although we enjoyed a good laugh at the joke, I asked myself, How did I come to be known as the tin collector in my town? In Chile…