Idaho Conversation League

Barefoot from Africa by Catharina © O n a recent cold snowy morning, I was visiting a friend who reminded me that as dazzling as the hypnotic snow is, it’s customary to brush the snow from our cars. Moving slowly and not accustomed to the cold; being from a continent of sunshine with no winters, I find snow enchanting. I was even amused when I saw that the bottle of water kept in my car was frozen. Funny, in my country there is always a lack of freezers. You have to search for ingenious ways to keep things cool; here you are searching for ways to keep things warm. Odd...funny, inside out and upside down, from where I come. -That is, barefoot from Africa . As I was trodding around my freezing little blue car, which was the color of my skin after five minutes out of the warmth of his shack; trying to look intelligent and knowing what I am doing in this cold; I noticed the soft inner feather of a bird's wing stuck in the ice of my car's windshield. I calle...

Pink Rabbits and Flying Dreams Last night, I had a fanciful dream that I was back at my old Virginia house. I haven’t lived there for decades, but recently went on Google Maps and flew around the woodsy neighborhood a bit. Something, I’ve admired about my father, is that whenever he bought a house, it was always adjacent to some woods, giving us young rapscallions a healthy place to run around to release our energy. In the dream, I awoke on Saturday daybreak and went outside, barefoot in my pajamas to collect a Washington Post from our snowy driveway. In reality, we lived on a sleepy dead end, but in the dream, cars could now connect into the forest. In fact, it was a bustling thoroughfare now; some elaborate racecars were speeding into the woods, as one or two old jalopies were pulling out and returning to civilization. Even though it was snowy, I was excited to be back, and thought I would take an encompassing walk around the backyard, while waiting for th...