The times we had oh, when the wind would blow with rain and snow were not all bad we put our feet just where they had, had to go never to go “Postcards From Italy,” Beirut The view from our castle tower is stunning, the lights of Saturday-night Nürnberg spread out below us in sequined splendor. We’re…
Category: Travel
{I Am} Home for Christmas
Love is not a toy, and no paper will conceal it. Love is simply joy that I’m home. Sara Barielles, “Love Is Christmas” “We’re writing letters to Santa today?” asked the eleventh graders, staring quizzically at the red and green papers I handed out on the last Friday before Christmas Break. “No,” I replied. “Letters from Santa….
Open Letter (Of Thanks) To My Flight Home
While my fellow teachers in America sleep in and make food, we spend Thanksgiving in Germany at school, celebrating even on a school day. Some classes have snacks. Mine have a creative writing assignment, a letter of thanks to an object, abstraction or entity that represents what they’re thankful for. This year, I’m thankful to…
Roman Holiday IV: Rain or Shine
Having just returned home from an eight-day excursion to Florence, Rome and Venice with the Class of 2014, I have plenty of tales to tell. Rather than try to combine them all into a massive novel-blog, which would test both your perseverance and my creativity, I’ll be posting anecdotes at intervals, saving them for rainy…
Faithful To The Fields
…What we owe the future is not a new start, for we can only begin with what has happened. We owe the future the past, the long knowledge that is the potency of time to come. That makes of a man’s grave a rich furrow. The community of knowing in common is the seed of…
Summer Places
We’ve barely dropped our bags when he starts heading down the hill, away from the well-marked buildings of Mount Hermon Christian Camp and Conference Center, into a maze of boxy cabins balanced on a steep and shady hillside. After just a few minutes of following, my mother, cousins and I stop behind my father,…
Airports
Starbucks vanilla lattes taste the same, everywhere and always. With one sip of sweet, hot, vaguely coffee-flavored milk, I could be fourteen and trying coffee for the first time, or twenty and drinking my first latte of my shift at 5:30 AM as the sun rises. It doesn’t matter that ten years have passed, or…
Home is Wherever I’m With You
Brother Tom nodded understandingly. “It’s the memories, the old loyalties; they are so precious,” he said. “Things that meant so much, that stay present in the wood and stone of a place. If you let go of the place and the things that belong to it, you feel afraid that you’ll lose hold of the…
Winter Warmth
And in the humid ever-summer I dare his picturing mind not to go back to the shout of color, to the clean rasp of frosty air, to the smell of pine wood burning and the caressing warmth of kitchens. For how can one know color in perpetual green, and what good is warmth without cold…
Things (And Mostly People) That Made Life Better This Year: 2012 Edition
Black Forest Academy–this ever-changing community of staff and students that flow in and out of this little valley on the edge of the dark hills–is a place of tradition. Do something once, whether it’s dumping someone in a pond on their birthday or granting crazy Christmas wishes, and it’s likely that you’ll be asked to…
The Way Home 