sea salt

Last Tuesday I got behind the wheel of my car and drove to Florida.* 24 hours. 1,400 miles. 11 states. 0 requests for passports, 0 check points, 0 guards inspecting the trunk, 0 inquisitive looks at an unmarried woman travelling with two men. During my 11pm-2am shift on the return trip, I looked up at the quiet, starry sky over North Carolina and realized for the first time in my easy American life, I'm free . I'm surprised this never occurred to me sooner, considering how many long road trips I've taken. Some trips have been for fun, a car full of college students en route to my home in Florida for spring break; other trips were somber and dutiful, travelling from Boston to Philadelphia to share the final days of a dear friend's father; my favorite trips were the ones I took alone, driving myself to and from college, 13 uninterrupted hours on I-95 with the windows down and my ponytail blowing wildly against my neck. As a young girl and then a young woman, travell...

Writing success!  Oh for joy!  My second publication ("Mt. Auburn") has made it to the Web.  You can read it at  http://falling-apart.net/ .  My first published essay was featured online at http://www.paradigmjournal.com/ (the mitchell issue); Paradigm is now publishing a printed anthology of some of the year's best work, and my essay "What I Think My Grandmother is Thinking" is going to be included.  This anthology will be available for purchase through Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble.  In the grand scheme of the world, and specifically the writing world, these small feats aren't worth a hill of beans.  But in my world they're magic beans, and I'll do anything I can for another handful.  The only thing I can really do, of course, is to write.  And right now, that's all I want to do...

At Government Center train station, where I transfer from the green line of work to the blue line of home, I am privileged to hear free performances by a few of Boston's growing number of train station musicians. Some of these are quite talented (a guitar player at Park Street who sings country songs, a trumpeter at Davis Square who plays Beatles and Van Morrison tunes); others simply play and sing because they know how. Either way, they are hard to ignore - they are singing to get your attention, and hopefully, your money. A few weeks ago someone got my attention - he was softly playing the guitar, looking down, not singing. Yet when I heard the notes my heart stood at attention, this familiar melody calling me to a deep peace that I'd known since childhood. The song was "Trust and Obey," a hymn composed by Daniel Brink Towner in the late 1880s. I have known every word of this song since I was a child, though I have never sung it in church. My mother used to si...

  (published in Evergreen Review, Issue No. 125) Last week I was detained at a border crossing in the Middle East. (1) I realize this sounds to many of you like the first sentence in an editorial that you might see in U.S. News and World Report .  And prior to my trip, I would have thought stories that began like this were rare, or isolated to tall, dark, bearded men foolishly trying to smuggle guns across the border.  This time, it's my story. (2) To get to the Israeli border in the first place, my friend and I drove to the Jordanian border check, where our bags were scanned for weapons, our passports were checked and stamped, and we boarded a bus where our passports were collected, inspected again, and returned once we reached the Israeli border.  At the Israeli border, teenagers in khaki pants and polo shirts held massive guns over their shoulders, talking to each other and texting on their phones.  When our bus pulled up they watched us, hands...