Art Is Long. Life Is Short.

FRAMED: WORKS BY ERIN BRADY WORSHAM November 13 & 14 at Studio East, 1520 Woodland Street When John Guider and Stacey Irvin (two highly talented photographer friends of mine) tell me I should go and see an art show, I listen. They can’t say enough good things about Erin Brady Worsham, an artist they’re featuring at…

Unexpected Tailwinds

You don’t always realize it right away when the wind swings around on you. A number of life’s big changes are wind shears–sudden and sometimes catastrophic. But more often, it seems to me, your journey shifts imperceptibly, a strengthening crosswind gradually changing your course. My first Women in Aviation, International conference, a gathering of thousands of…

The ABCs of Loss

When people we love die, we move on with life, because we have to. The closer they were to us, the longer it takes. But eventually, life’s dailiness takes over: we set the alarm each day, pour cereal, prune shrubs, feed the cat. But the absence casts a shadow, the colors of things are ever…

Russian Lessons: The Dacha Life

Again, with the musty old essays! I wrote this one three or four years ago and just rediscovered it last week. da·cha (däch) n. A Russian country house or villa. For years, I have wanted my very own dacha. Maybe there’s something about dying empires that stirs longing. In September of 1991, I boarded a…

Notes from the Jury Box: The State’s First Witness

Opening Statements: A Real-Life Murder Mystery The State’s chief attorney, an intense young woman with porcelain features, takes the stage, startling us out of our torpor. She paces and gesticulates emphatically, as if to communicate her moral outrage: the defendant, she insists, has shot an unarmed man who begged for his life in his final…