And all of us with our closed eyes smelled the frangipani blossoms in the big rectangles of open wall, flowers so sweet they conjure up sin or heaven, depending on which way you are headed.
Anatole has been explaining to me the native system of government. He says the business of throwing pebbles into bowls with the most pebbles winning an election—that was Belgium’s idea of fair play, b...
All morning I'd felt the strange disjuncture that comes from reconnecting with your past. There's such a gulf between yourself and who you were then, but people speak to that other person and it answe...
According to Indian crop ecologist Vandana Shiva, humans have eaten some 80,000 plant species in our history. After recent precipitous changes, three-quarters of all human food now comes from just eig...
AS LONG AS I KEPT MOVING, my grief streamed out behind me like a swimmer’s long hair in water. I knew the weight was there but it didn’t touch me. Only when I stopped did the slick, dark stuff of it c...
A life was a life. She'd been orphaned at an age to internalize death as poor material for a joke. And likewise, salvation.
A human being can be good or bad or right or wrong, maybe. But how can you say a person is illegal? You just can't. That's all there is to it.
800 million people are chronically underfed (6 will die of hunger-related causes while you read this article), it’s because they lack money and opportunity, not because food is unavailable in their co...
48-point type, a letter size that big-city newspapers probably reserve for special occasions such as Armageddon. Out here in the heartland, we are not waiting that long. Our local paper’s stance on th...
We sang in church ! Which means
The twins too, they've never cared a hoot what they looked like. They spent so much time staring at each other's faces before they were born they can go the rest of their lives passing up mirrors with...
So he just stood there brewing like a coffeepot. Only with a coffeepot you know exactly what's going to come out of it.
Everything else is in motion while God does not move at all. God sits still, perfectly at rest, the silver dollar at the bottom of the well, the question.
On asparagus) Europeans of the Renaissance swore by it as an aphrodisiac, and the church banned it from nunneries.
We’ve learned that some of our favorite things like DDT and the propellants in aerosol cans were rapidly unraveling the structure and substance of our biosphere. We gave them up, and reversed the thre...
Was after they discovered the world was round. I’m not scared of big words. I didn’t say you were. You did, too! ‘I realize you’re no scientist, Miss Rawley,
On the weekends. He’d mentioned a place called Sweet Briar where he met other scientists. She felt the trailer’s absence
Nothing wondrous can come in this world unless it rests on the shoulders of kindness. He
Is true I do not speak as well as I can think. But that is true of most people, as nearly as I can tell.
Fact our shoes filled with mud and our clothes turned to slime, and it was the farthest thing from pleasant. Mosquitoes that had lain dormant through the long drought now hatched and rose from the for...