I moved to America at the age of 9. Though I hadn’t experienced much in my short years, my native Africa was all I’d known. Though some might say there isn’t much for a 9-year-old to start over from, at the time it felt as though I’d gone from one world to another. I had […]

Feathers flew over and into the maple tree in the unexpected breeze. Children, whooping and giggling, scurried around trying to capture some before they were gone forever. Mémère, visiting for a month, had been in a “grand ménage” (spring cleaning) frenzy. Every down pillow had been ripped open. The feathers were hand-washed, then laid on […]

The soft knock on my bedroom door came in the late summer of 1968. “Your father is gone,” said my mother from the other side of the door. “Gone where?” “He didn’t say,” she said as she turned and walked away to her car to leave for work. She was a woman not given to […]

“We’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.” Joni Mitchell’s iconic anthem “Woodstock” played softly in the distance from the farmhouse. Time passed pleasantly under the August sun. My daughter Cara and I lugged heavy stones to build a makeshift wall for a flower garden. We chatted about our respective teaching jobs. It was […]

I awoke to the usual door lock disengaging, freeing my door for the last time. I was excited, nervous and maybe even a little scared. Today was the end of a very important lesson that I gave 15 years of my life to. Within minutes I would take that lesson and leave the life I […]

I stuck fairly close to the small New England town where I lived through college and a job nearby with the phone company. I liked the job, but after a year I decided that I did not want to spend the rest of my life there, and, on a whim, joined the Peace Corps and […]

“Now you’re one of those people, the ones who live at the end of the road,” my new neighbor quipped when I dropped something off at his house, an old cape with gawking black windows and all the paint gone from the clapboards, secreted at the end of another dirt road that backs up on […]

My adventure starts in July 2016 when for security reasons, my wife and I decided to abandon everything we were able to build in order to protect and save our offspring. In Angola I was living perfectly good. Despite the insecurity we were facing, life was treating us well because we had the minimum to […]

I was over 70 when I decided to start over. My husband of about 25 years had died a few years before and I was sick of caring for the three acres on the top of a hill in the mountains in New Hampshire. Don’t get me wrong. I loved it there. I loved the […]

The year was 1953. I was in the third grade in Northeast Harbor schools and it was Christmas break. My mother was having a troubled second marriage, and a decision was made that I would return to school after the break in Jonesport. This is where my father hung his hat on the weekends as […]