We met them at the airport. It was two o'clock in the afternoon and they had been traveling for twenty-six hours. "You made it! Karibuni! Karibu New York! Sasa? Umeamka? Poa! I'm so glad you all are here!" We gathered the group of twenty-eight travel-weary singers towards one side of the arrivals hall and waited... Continue Reading →
How do you teach a thing, knowing that you will not truly succeed unless something much deeper comes with it? How do you illuminate joy? How do you communicate the meaning of necessary love? And how do you show that, like it or not, we each make a difference? _______________________________ I kept glancing anxiously at... Continue Reading →
When the temperature drops, what do you let loose? Gentle rain? Snow wrapped hail? Lightening and thunder? A swirling vortex that pitches cows and cars into trees? When the rain falls, do you squish like mud? Soak it up like the grass? Disappear it like sand? Let it roll off your granite back? When the... Continue Reading →
"Hello Ms. Lillis." Grigor was, as usual, first to arrive in my choir room. Slightly out of breath from the stairs, he paced awkwardly in front of me - body parallel to the desk but eyes fixed on me. Without a break in my typing, I glanced up from my computer and smiled. "Hi Grigor." ... Continue Reading →
One dry day in July, a hot wind swept me through the sun-scorched fields of central Iowa. I was a blinking red dot on a GPS unit, gliding though a near-perfect grid of rural county roads where east, west, north, and south meet at right angles, rushing rushing ever towards and away. The corn in... Continue Reading →
... is in knowing that, even when she is not actually in distress, she will always be helped. Car trouble? Pop the hood and fiddle with the fluid gauges, pull out the jack and start setting it up, put up those hazard triangles and see just how quickly the mechanical muscles show up. House flooded? Appliances... Continue Reading →
Living with a foot on two continents means traveling between the two places regularly, and regular travel brings the inevitable question: so what are you going to eat first when you go home? A frenzy of thoughts usually trample through my brain each time this happens, always beginning with that incessant and tiring question 'where... Continue Reading →
Ode to Plastic Bending and unyielding; Soft as flesh or hard as bone. Inanimate. And yet there is No form you cannot assume, No task to which you are not applied. Shaper, connector, keeper; All the tools of this great race are Fashioned from you and by you. No child of these generations will know... Continue Reading →
"Perhaps even more important, I still had a deep love for the place I had been born in, and liked the idea of going back to be a part of it again. And that, too, I felt obligated to try and understand. Why should I love any one place so much more than any other? ... Continue Reading →
There is a nugget of time between the last grip of night and the first flush of dawn when the trees erupt in birdsong. As the inky dark dissolves into pale gold and the grey trees unfurl their green, the day inhales the morning and the breath is greeted with jubilation. The exuberant strains are... Continue Reading →
Of Wonders & Wanders 
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