Happy New Year, dear friends! I’m a big believer in the ritual of end-of-year reflection. Though where does one begin to reflect on a such a roller-coaster year as 2021? It’s been a year of pandemic variations, of masks on, then off, then on again; of Capitol insurrections and stolen inaugurations. (Read my piece published in The Independent on that topic: https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/inauguration-day-2021-online-events-biden-b1789697.html) On the personal side, it wa

Greetings from Dairy Hollow, friends. It was a darn long drive from Washington: 1,334 miles over two days, across four states and countless rivers, including the Ole Miss. When I crossed that great river, at the border between Tennessee and Missouri, I'd officially made it to the West. If you consider that I started this journey in June, it’s actually taken 6 months to get here. Sheesh! I'm certain the wait was worth it, as I settle into my new digs at the writers’ colony (ht

I made it to verdant, voluptuous Vermont. But this is not a sabbatical. My hawk sighting last October prompted me to pack-up and fly my DC coop. But at the rate I’m going, I’ll hardly get to West Virginia, much less all the way across country, on my quest for #freedom and #simplicity. What this is turning out to be: a journey to my core of rot.* And what a MARVELous landscape it is: more precipitous than the Grand Canyon, craggier than the Rockies, vaster than the Mojave, lus

I’m living the dream. Over the last six months, inspired by the hawk, I reduced my life down to what could fit in the back of my VW Tiguan. Then, in June, I got in my car, set my Google Maps, and drove into the sunset, a free bird, on the road for a magical, mystical year. So how come, these last two magical months, I’ve been throwing temper tantrums? In my cozy Airbnb apartment, in the quaint hamlet of Rhinecliff, as a heatwave settled into the Hudson River Valley, I pulled