25 Jan 25 In the morning Laurent is sitting at the kitchen table with a little knife shaving the pith off an orange. The night before he boiled the milk with the cinnamon sticks as the base for the crème… Read More ›
Creative Nonfiction
The French
25 Jan 25 Yesterday we drove to France to spend the weekend with our friends Laurent and Nanou, their kids Romane, Valentine and Mathis, a new baby boy named Hector. Driving across Europe I felt expansive. In two or three… Read More ›
The big eraser
23 Jan 25 After days of it the fog finally broke and everything looked crystalline or coated in confectioners’ sugar, flocked. Before bed I read Anne Lamott’s memoir, the scene of her with her dad that day at the beach… Read More ›
Belongings and belonging
22 Jan 25 In the morning the frost looked like snow on the rooftops and roads and made for art photography that never came out right. I liked the town better when it was empty and closed down and imagined… Read More ›
Figures in the fog
21 Jan 25 All the rooms in mom’s house were irregular, the lines along the ceilings sloped or sagging. The toilet in her bathroom angled downwards. The problem I had with the old photos and going through them was they… Read More ›
Farmlands and homelands
20 Jan 25 It is another night with the heat pad. The ancient looking heater by my bed worked for a few days but then I made the mistake of fiddling with the knobs (there’s no clear on/off logic) and… Read More ›
First Sunday in Germany
19 Jan 25 I went to Uwe and Miriam’s house on Schwalbenhälde and told them about our time at the hardware store trying to replace mom’s Küchenwasserhahn. No matter how well you communicate your problem, people working in hardware stores… Read More ›
The case for spending your time vs. taking it
I went back up the Himmelsleiter but took a different route. It was my first time here in January. After a moody walk in the Jack the Ripper fog the night before I was ready for a walk in the… Read More ›
The days run away like wild horses over the hills
15 Jan 25 Another sleepless trap, tonight in my mom’s 15th-century house, below freezing outdoors and not much different in. She wasn’t joking about how cold it gets. There’s no heat to speak of that makes it to the bathrooms… Read More ›
Before coffee got automated
Thirty years ago I joined Starbucks in Philadelphia as a manager-in-training, my fourth coffee shop job in four years. I’d work in downtown Philadelphia for a year, then transfer to a Starbucks on Mercer Island, near Seattle, the next summer…. Read More ›
Bill Pearse 