My teeth are stuck together from eating nougat, that oh-so-sweet French confection, via the Middle East, of honey, nuts and egg whites. We hit a nougat factory in Montélimar yesterday and bought it by the kilo. Multiple kilos. I can’t get enough. Got to make sure it makes it safely home. The house in Vaison-la-Romaine…
Category: Care and Feeding of the Soul
Why so many women are so fucking angry. September 22, 2018
Because we treat girls like shit and make them believe they deserve it. Things that I have remembered from my past, unbidden, as I have imagined how Dr Christine Blasey Ford must feel and have felt having her memory of her assault challenged. When I was about 11 or 12 I was in a friend’s…
Home Again, Home Again ~~ January 12, 2018
On the plane — January 11 We are almost home after a month’s absence. It’s been an incredible trip — upending my mind, raising my consciousness, lighting up the globe of my imagination so that places that were once just names to me are now pulsing with life. It’s been the kind of transformative trip…
Random Things I Love about Paris ~~ January 7, 2018
It’s our second to last night in Paris, capping off a trip of a lifetime to exotic places I never thought to see. With all that adventure, I planned a little familiar comfort at the end of the trip with a few days in the loveliest city in the world. I wish I could write…
Breads and spreads ~~ January 3, 2018
On the plane from Amman to Paris. About to take off. Images, thoughts, impressions, and emotions about our month in Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan are a swirling kaleidoscope in my head. This has been one of those change-the-way-you-see-the-world trips. It will take me some time to process it. But mostly, in this moment, I am…
The hopes and fears ~~ December 24, 2017
Waking up in Bethlehem the day before Christmas Eve. I don’t think I’ve been in a sadder place. It’s Palestinian territory, landlocked in the West Bank, surrounded by walls designed by Israelis to keep terror and violence where they belong, which, they are determined, will not be in Israel. The day before, we arrived shortly…
Deep thoughts and full stomachs ~~ December 22, 2017
A few days ago we were en route to Jerusalem from a Druze village in the north, tight against the Syrian border. There was bloody fighting here in 1973, a surprise attack on the Israelis from Syria on Yom Kippur. The Israelis were apparently caught unawares and as a consequence were fighting for their survival….
Knafeh ~~ December 20, 2017
Another day of over-eating. It was also a day in Old Jerusalem, and I’ll have more to say about that later as it sinks in. But right now my mind is focused on something blessedly more simple: knafeh. Knafeh (there are probably a dozen ways to spell it and almost as many to make it)…
Happiness in the Golan Heights ~~ December 20, 2017
(Still running a few days behind ~~ writing about 12/18 here) After we left Tzvat on Monday afternoon, we drove to the Golan Heights. A disconcerting length of the drive was within sight of Lebanon, clearly visible across a forbidding and impregnable border. When we got to the village where we were having dinner with…
and away she goes.... 