"Look at me. Even though I'm safe, back in my comfortable home, I'm still acting like a refugee--scavenging, foraging, guarding my small space, waiting out the end of the war. I'm going to survive, I know that. Someday I will talk about this calmly and insightfully. And for a good many years after that, I…
Meanwhile, Peri found solace in literature. Short stories, novels, poems, plays...she devoured whatever she could lay her hands on at the limited library at school. When there was nothing else to be found, she read encyclopedias. Devouring everything from Aardvark to Zombie, she came to know about things that, though of no current use in…
At midnight on all the other New Years her mother would usually get out some really nice paper, the kind with real bits of flower petal mixed in with its texture, and give her and her father two pieces each. They would each [...] write their wishes and hopes for the new year on to…
Noon dominated sea and sky--even the white line of Cannes, five miles off, had faded to a mirage of what was fresh and cool; a robin-breasted sailing boat pulled in behind it a strand from the outer, darker sea. It seemed that there was no life anywhere in all this expanse of coast except under…
She worked briskly and efficiently, taking her brush and pan from the drawing-room to the top of the stairs and making her way back down, a step at a time; after that she filled a bucket with water, fetched her kneeling-mat, and began to wash the hall floor. Vinegar was all she used. Soap left…
I woke up today to a crash downstairs and the sound of breaking glass. At first, I thought I must have been dreaming, but something told me that my dreams had been full of pleasant things, like cake and bunnies, and not of a beagle who, as I discovered when my racing heart and I…
For portions of every day, she manages to lose herself in realms of memory: the faint impressions of the visual world before she was six, when Paris was like a vast kitchen, pyramids of cabbages and carrots everywhere, bakers' stalls overflowing with pastries; fish stacked like cordwood in the fishmongers' booths, the runnels awash in…
"And it seemed that, just a little more--and the solution would be found, and then a new, beautiful life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that the end was still far, far off, and hat the most complicated and difficult part was just beginning." -Anton Chekhov (The Lady with the Little…
Here we are, yet again, in the Emerald Month; it crept up on me this year rather unexpectedly. Truth be told, my sense of time isn't so impressive these days. In part, I blame California and its lack of seasons. It's very disconcerting for a person to live in what essentially amounts to "season-less" time--one…
Happy Easter, Passover and soon-to-be Easter (Balkans and Slavs, I'm talking to you)! There are so many things to love right now about spring: sunshine and flowers, all the strawberries and asparagus (that is, if you're currently in California) that you could ever want and, most wonderful of all, that hopeful and energetic feeling that…
Dining with Dostoevsky 