My blog has migrated to a new host and is being painstakingly reconstructed here. Please bear with me as I iron out wrinkles, hammer out the dents, and apply enough spit and duct tape to hold it all together.— Karen
Breakfast in our room at the Oxford Airbnb “It’s all about expectations,” our Oxford Airbnb host said on Monday, as he led the way up several flights of stairs. I caught glimpses of rooms crammed floor to ceiling with books and toys, including a vintage Howdy Doody puppet – a relic, our host explained, of…
To me, the idea of running out of books is only slightly less frightening than running out of food or air. My greatest packing challenge used to be figuring out how many books I could jam into my luggage for long trips. If I used up my supply, I’d find myself scrounging desperately in hotel…
My grandmother, the silent film star Ramona Langley When my grandmother came to stay for the holidays, she would sweep up the driveway in a champagne-colored car with huge tail fins. Wearing rhinestone-studded sunglasses and an ancient fur coat, she’d spring from the car and shout, “Darlings! I’m here!” And then proceed to turn the…
So yesterday I was making my rounds of the shops in downtown Seville, collecting last-minute essentials such as gift tags and stocking stuffers. I was buzzing along towards store number five, thinking that I was doing pretty well, when I glanced down and realized that I had the last store’s plastic shopping basket slung over…
A Christmas card photo from our Ohio years One December, while having lunch in Seville with a British friend, I mentioned that I’d just finished composing my annual holiday letter, and he looked at me in astonishment bordering on horror. “You actually do one of those?” he said. “Well, yeah. It’s a great way to…
Bambi’s mother, killed by hunters, in the Disney film During my long-ago vegetarian phase, I visited friends in Alabama and happened to be seated next to an avid hunter at a dinner party. He talked in a sweet, lazy drawl about his father showing him how to stalk, kill, and skin animals in the woods,…
Our guest house in the Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan So I’m with friends hiking in the Himalayas, and we run into a Buddhist monk who is climbing up to a monastery where he will spend the next eight years in silent meditation . As our guide explains this, Rich grabs some of the monk’s stuff,…
Parents have a hard time enforcing clothing standards when local girls are wearing outfits like this to church. “So what do you think?” a rookie expat asked me this morning. “Should I let my two daughters, aged fourteen and seventeen, go off on their own, taking the bus from Seville to Granada?” Parents bringing teens…
“Edgy” and “outrageous” aren’t words I usually use to describe religious-themed holiday figurines, but a few days ago, strolling around a street market in Seville, I was gobsmacked by some of the latest offerings. If you don’t happen to live in a Mediterranean country, you may not know that here, an event as important as…
I had no idea what they were plotting… “I don’t want to make a big deal out of it,” I said to Rich and two friends some years ago en route to Nantucket. “In fact, let’s just pretend I’m not even having a fortieth birthday this weekend.” “Fine, great, no problem,” they all said. “No…
CELEBRATING GOOD NEIGHBORS These days I’m writing about Good Neighbors, exploring how the people around me are working to help each other get through these challenging times. My weekly posts appear on Tuesday or Wednesday, depending on my travel and research schedule.
THIS BLOG IS A PROMOTION-FREE ZONE. As my regular readers know, I never get free or discounted goods or services for mentioning anything on this blog (or anywhere else). I only write about things I find interesting and/or useful.
