Abby’s Spinning Gift Guide 2014 Do you have a spinner in your life for whom you’d like to buy a gift, but you aren’t sure what he or she would like? I’ve pulled together a list of some favourite items in various price ranges to help, followed by a few tips on shopping for spinners […]

The fall teaching schedule is always jam-packed and exciting, and when I get home — usually just before Thanksgiving — I tend to have a huge email backlog from being on the road, and a staggering to-do list that I always expect to complete in the relative lull (well, at least it’s a travel lull) […]

Thank you to Nilda for organizing this. Gracias a Nilda por organizar esta misa. 14 Nov 2014, Chinchero, 7p

Dear Chris, A year ago I got up and, looking out the window, realized that the winter’s first snow had fallen overnight. It wasn’t much, but it was on the early side for southwestern Ohio. I thought about how I wasn’t ready for winter, and about how you were probably, at that very moment, waiting […]

It’s been a long year. Like, a really really long year. The kind of year I wouldn’t wish on anyone ever, actually — a year that has really tested and tried my ability to stay calm and keep things together. It’s been the kind of year where I’ve stopped thinking “At least this must be […]

Tonight there was heat lightning, and that always makes me think of this one time. It was a long time ago but it’s always what goes through my mind. So this one time, and I haven’t gotten that far in reading old handwritten notebooks yet, but it was 1978. We’d been living in Lircay, Peru, […]

Yesterday morning five months ago, my mother got off a plane in Cusco, Peru. I can’t begin to guess how many times in her life my mother had done just that, or how many times — just like this one — she was met at the airport by Nilda and her husband Paulino. I was […]

The job was soul-sucking. In retrospect, I realized it was that way in part because they really did just want me to quit; no amount of determination or work on my part was going to change anything. But at the time, it seemed like the right thing: like what I had to do. My office […]

Dear Chris, I bet you wondered, any time you read the birthday letters I wrote to Ed after he died, whether I’d write them to you, too, when you were gone. You never asked me, but I bet you wondered. Well, so. There are ways that losing you is harder than losing Ed. My father […]

My father wrote: 2 March 1977 Chinchero We passed a quiet day watching the rain and mud. I managed to get a couple of hours in practicing doing a Loraypu with both hands, that is picking up from either side towards the middle. When the sun finally began to shine, we sat out by the […]