When it’s important to hold Mama’s hand
My daughter, granddaughter, and I had cruised the aisles of a local grocery store called Fusion on Sunday morning and were walking back to Jessica’s flat in Mid-Levels, Hong Kong. My granddaughter was doing what most two-year-old children do: insisting on climbing...
Thoughts about home while walking Victoria Peak
My daughter Jessica and I amble along the road toward The Peak in western Hong Kong. It’s the rainy season—warm, humid, misty, and foggy. Welcome breezes cool us and ward off bugs, though we sprayed our exposed skin with repellent before starting out. There are...
When life presents you with a sinkhole
We sip our drinks and munch on fresh-cut veggies with homemade hummus while sitting on the terrace, facing the Three Ridges Wilderness area. It’s late Friday afternoon, the end of the week, time to kick back and relax before supper. Inside the house, Heathcliff...
Close Encounter of the Snake Kind
“Keith, Keith! Look out the dormer window!” “What? Where?” “There’s a snake draped on top of the tomato trellis above the square foot garden.” “I see it now. Maybe its hunting birds or camouflaging itself against hawks.” Birds often perched on the trellis. And a...
Stay in the story
A couple of weeks ago, a wood thrush banged into one of our windows. Other birds have done the same and recovered, like last summer’s Scarlet Tanager and more recently, this yellow-bellied sapsucker. Keith and I had not seen wood thrushes here at Vanaprastha,...
The Moment of Lift
One day, spring semester 1981 in my American Humanities class at Ursuline Academy of Dallas, we viewed a slide of Mary Cassatt’s Mother and Child. As a young and somewhat pretentious teacher, I pronounced Cassatt’s last name in French—apologies to my students....