The news broke earlier this month on a Sunday. Viktoria Marinova, an investigative journalist, had been killed in Ruse, Bulgaria, a city in the northeast corner of this country. The Danube, on its epic flow, runs through Ruse. Bulgaria is on the river’s southern bank; Romania is to the north. Marinova’s death had been brutal, and the hypotheses swirled....
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In August I sold my car Thor to a friend’s daughter who lives in Salem, Oregon. I offered to drive Thor to her doorstep, envisioning a nostalgic road trip punctuated with serendipity and fertile solitude. I had begun my cross-country drive-a-thon earlier in the summer when I flew into Miami Beach, where I had deposited Thor before returning to the...
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In our fridge, the shelves lining the door are colonized by condiments. Shelf after shelf of condiments. The condiments jostle for limited real estate, obscure their labels behind the plastic railings that corral them into place and rattle a glass-on-glass chorus when the door is opened. Sound familiar? The rest of the fridge holds food from 2018. But the...
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Dear Flagstaff, I am sorry. Truly, madly, deeply sorry. If you’ve noticed an increase in mosquitoes this summer, I have to take the blame. If you’ve been ambushed by a swarm, if you’ve slapped more than the usual seasonal dose, if you’ve returned home from a walk in the forest with what looks like a constellation chart of bug bites on your arms and legs,...
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It was late afternoon earlier this week, day eight of my road trip from the tip of Florida up the East Coast to Vermont. It was time for coffee to fuel the next 200 miles I needed to bank to reach my final destination. I pulled off Interstate 88 in verdant, undulating eastern New York. Two women sitting on a stoop directed me to the town’s only coffee...
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