à la carte spirit by ilona fried
Family
Trading Old for New, East for West
Sometimes the past visits in unexpected places. On Tuesday, I dropped off yet another donation of stuff. Normally, at this collection center, a brawny and frequently tattooed employee pushes a wheeled bin toward my car or approaches to help unload as I pull up. This time a slender man in his 60s ambled by as … Continue reading
New Diagnosis: Post Traumatic Stuff Disorder
Post Traumatic Stuff Disorder: When Cluttered Environments Trigger Anxiety and Dread Each night along the Camino de Santiago, I sorted and organized the contents of my backpack, leaving behind what I no longer needed. Sometimes all I threw away were cheese rinds and Band-Aid wrappers, essentially weightless, taking up little space. Other times I left … Continue reading
Turkey is Not a Synonym for Gratitude
I didn’t always dread Thanksgiving. Growing up in the 1970s and early 1980s, I looked forward to it. I loved the special dishes my mother prepared (sauteed mushrooms and onions being one). I enjoyed making relish, hand cranking cranberries and an orange, rind and all, through a metal meat grinder and watching it ooze red … Continue reading
Budapest: Beauty or Beast?
It’s Halloween, a chance to contemplate what is more creepy: a truly beautiful person masquerading as a hideous beast, or an attractive costume that camouflages beastly hate? Two very different news items on Hungary, one on beauty, the other on beastliness, grabbed my attention in the last week. The first, the results of a Conde … Continue reading
Ratatouille for Two
“That smells really good,” said my house-mate’s boyfriend the other evening while I stirred ratatouille in a small pan. He was leaving and she had escorted him to the door. “Are you using a recipe?” she asked, returning to the kitchen. “No,” I said, because I wasn’t following someone else’s instructions. But I was relying … Continue reading
à la carte spirit by ilona fried 
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