It felt like we were extras in a scene from a science fiction movie, the kind where all the people are gone and only the buildings remain. As my wife Paula and I crossed Venice’s Piazza San Marco – St. Mark’s Square, one of the most iconic bucket-list destinations in the world –...
Leaning into winter in a quiet corner of France
It has finally gotten cold enough that the red fox serenading us almost every night during the fall has gone silent. Or maybe we just can’t hear it anymore because the skylights in our bedroom facing the valley are closed tight for the winter. Throughout autumn, we could hear the fox, usually around...
Captives of France: An escape story
Standing at the prefecture window in Dijon, Paula and I realized with sudden, inescapable clarity that we were trapped in France. On the surface, this was a situation unlikely to elicit sympathy from our friends. “Poor you, stuck in a beautiful country, in summer, with nothing but Paris and Aix-en-Provence and Normandy and...
The Long Goodbye: Embracing Life Is Slowly Killing Me
I WANT TO FIND whoever said getting there is half the fun, and beat him bloody with a three-ring binder – a thick black one, like the notebooks we filled with enough documents to constitute our complete life stories and dragged to the French consulate in Houston three weeks ago to apply for our...
Feeling French: We went to France, and all we got was this amazing house
A bit of madness is key To give us new colors to see Who knows where it will lead us? And that’s why they need us… Here’s to the ones who dream. — Mia, in “La La Land” So here is the next adventure,...