About a backpack
When I was going train hiking in the summer of 1975, I purchased a new external frame backpack.
I had no idea it would still be with me on travels all these many years later.
Travel
Between 2 countries, finding a place to belong
What could a story about a woman moving from Ireland to Brooklyn in the 1950s have in common with me moving from Sweden to Iowa in the 1970s? Actually quite a bit more than I thought just from watching the movie trailer.
There’s no place like home
Home. We live there. Leave and come back. But what does ‘home’ really mean? And what makes something or someplace ‘home’?
My best summer
I was going on an adventure. Leaving my small hometown in Sweden for the great metropolis of Berlin, Germany. By myself. As in, I came up with the idea, I planned the trip, I made all the arrangements.
McDonald’s in Salzburg and pizza in Scotland
There are folks who travel and want that other place to be just like home. And there are folks who travel and want that other place to be totally different from anything back home.
A moment that changed everything
She looked around the room and asked, loud enough so everyone would hear: “Does anyone here know Berlin?”
Expressing gratitude or “the rest of the story”
Our lives don’t play out in isolation. We each have people who are crucial at various points in our lives. Meet a few of mine.
Walls and fences — to keep us apart
When the Berlin Wall went up on August 13, 1961, I was 300 miles away in Sweden. I was 6. And had a terrible time figuring this whole thing out.
“Cosmopolitan” is a _______ word
Recently I discovered that “cosmopolitan” apparently is a bad word to some people. Silly me, I always thought a cosmopolitan person was someone who’d been places, different cities, different cultures, different countries and who moved with ease in them all.
