We spent our first day of vacation in Curaçao snorkeling, hanging around our airbnb, and exploring out our front door on foot. Not captured in photos are the sea turtle, corals, and multicolored reef fish we saw underwater.
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Morning sunshine in the front cactus garden My writing spot Stairway to the snorkeling spot off the back deck View from the back stairs I don’t know what this plant is but I love the little yellow pompom flowers Churchbell across the street Our street I don’t know what this is, but I like it So much color on our walk 😍 -
Churchbells clang on a sunny, windy morning. Palms rustle. They scrape shiny speared leaves against one another. The low rumble of a power boat carries across the water to where I sit on our back deck, in a turquoise lounge chair, straw hat flopping in the breeze, looking out over the Caribbean sea. A rooster crows in the distance. Cock-a-doodle-dooooooo.
The bottom of my ceramic mug scrapes against slate-colored tiles under my wicker chair when I lift the cup to sip coffee. I hear dishes clink in the kitchen, a cupboard door bump shut, and our daughter’s sweet voice saying “Good morning!” as my husband walks into the open air house with his frothy mug.
I smell salt air and coffee. My fingers smell like ink. Floating 100 meters beyond the railing of our patio is a small white fishing boat. The dark fisherman wears a bright shirt, neon like a traffic cone, a brilliant orange contrast to the turquoise shallows below him.
Palm fronds tick against the concrete wall beside me. A solitary car passes on the winding road out front. Tropical birds whirr and chirp.
A little yellow bird just landed on the cushion by my toes. It hopped onto the tile next to my chair, then hopped up on the white lip of my coffee cup. The bird was small, like a goldfinch, and the same sunshine yellow.
The sea’s skin is wrinkled with sharp-edged ripples as far as I can see. Swells rise and fall gently beneath them.
The church bell just rang out again. This time it’s setting off a chorus of animals. Dog barks rise all around and echo off the mountain behind us, roosters cock-a-doodle-doo, birds titter excitedly. The bell keeps ringing. More dogs, roosters, and small birds lend their voices, and more join in to answer their call, till this quiet little Sunday morning becomes a cacophony of the deep clang of a metal bell, dogs barking, roosters crowing, and birds chattering.
The final ring of the bell hangs in the air, and the local animals get in one final yip, one final crow, and a few final tweets and chirps. It is soon quiet again. All I hear are the rustle of the fronds, the scratch of my pen in my journal, and the scrape of my ceramic mug against the tile as I lift it to my lips to sip coffee.
I’ve been dipping my toes back into writing exercises, mostly drills like “set a timer for ten minutes and write all the sounds you hear.” I’ve only been writing in my journal, but we’re vacationing in Curaçao right now, a tiny desert island about 70 miles north of Venezuela, and I wanted to remember this morning.
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My fiddling in the flower beds is never done. These past two days, though, rain has forced me indoors to watch the garden instead of work in it. I went out today between showers to get some photos.
Rain gauge, salvia, and lambs ears 
The rain brought down the Dogwood petals 
The yarrow is beginning to yellow (barely) 
Chamomile volunteers from last year’s plants 
A new salvia in the garden: rose sensation 
Scabiosa bud 
Tulips and salvia 
Lilac in bloom with water droplets 
April 9: front bed
May 5: front bed
April 9: back hill
May 5: back bed -
I spent last week’s daylight hours almost exclusively outside. I drank my morning coffee indoors, then put on my gardening gloves and hat and spent the days digging, carting, planting, and shoveling. I calculated on my gardening blog that I spread more than 2 tons of mulch in about 3 days. I was exhausted by the end of the week, but now everything is so pretty I can’t help but just stand at the windows (it’s raining) and admire all the plants that are about to burst into bloom. I ventured out into the drizzle today to capture these early buds and blossoms.
These tulips will open any second now. 
Redbud 😍 
The lilac will smell delicious when these blossoms open 
The dogwood remains a favorite. I take this same photo every year 😛 
The redbud is thick with fuscia buds this year 
Our dogwood and a front bed before anything fills in 
Hosta unfurling under the dogwood 
Rhododendron and wood pile out back 
Tiny yellow flowers on my new spicebush These photos aren’t great due to low light, but I want to preserve them here so I can see where everything was this time of year when I look back at my blog next year :-).
Vervain bud
Tiny yarrow flower bud (upper left)
Salvia bud (middle left)
Blueberry buds and blossomsAnd just because I’m proud of the work I did last week, here are before and after photos for the mulching, from my April 10: Two tons of mulch spread. And I got a spicebush post on my gardening blog.
Before mulch: front bed April 9: front bed
Before mulch: back hill April 9: back hill -
I traveled to Belgrade, Serbia last week to produce our first ever European Support Driven conference. I did not know what to expect from Belgrade, other than knowing it was a great pleasure to work with our event coordinator, Jelena, who is from Belgrade. I was very work-focused and hardly thought about the location part except in logistical terms for the event. The city would be whatever it would be. I’d eat, I’d work, and then I’d go home to Virginia.
And then I arrived in Belgrade. Jelena picked me up from the airport and took me to the old part of the city, to the waterfront down the hill from the fortress that overlooks the confluence of the Sava and Danube rivers. We ate a lazy sun-drenched lunch next to the Sava river, at a place called Sofa. She told me about growing up in Belgrade, and pointed out the bridges where there had been live concerts every day during the 90s to form a living shield so the bridges wouldn’t be taken out in the bombings. She said this all very matter-of-factly, describing the sounds of the air sirens and the bombs. Now Belgrade is a peaceful place, and she laughed because she liked that she missed school for a year during that time.
Our hotel was across the river in New Belgrade, and after our warm, drowsy lunch, she showed me some coffee and pastry shops near our hotel, then dropped me off since I had been awake for more than 30 hours at that point.
The next morning I walked to a pastry shop I didn’t learn how to say the name of until my final day in Belgrade — the shop name was written in Cyrillic. It’s written Хлеб и Кифле and pronounced Hleb & Kifle. I couldn’t decide among the pastries, so I bought (and ate) two: an almond croissant and some sort of tubular pastry that looked like a 6-inch double-shotgun barrel with cinnamon apple filling.
The morning was crisp and sunny, a beautiful spring day, and I didn’t want to go back to my room. I texted my colleague Scott to see if he was up and wanted to take a walk before we started working on conference setup that afternoon, then I crossed the river on foot and we wandered around Belgrade.
Crossing the Sava River on foot, from New Belgrade to old One of my favorite things about Belgrade was the street art. The sun was low when I walked, so most of my photos have harsh shadows, and I wasn’t able to capture as many of the murals and graffiti as I would have liked. Our daughter is really into street art and would have loved to see all this. I wish she could have been there with me.
Graffiti on Branko’s Bridge 
David Bowie? Looks like him. Mural in Savamala neighborhood, Belgrade 
City devouring its greenery. By Italian artist Blu. 
We saw this little piggie all over town. We wandered streets with no goal in mind, and ended up first in a little Bohemian section of town, and then the fancier city center.
Old building we stumbled on 
Skadarlija – Bohemian street 
Manufaktura restuarant outdoor seating 
City Center pedestrian walk After our walk, we got to work, and I didn’t stray far from the hotel until the conference was over. When it was finished, Jelena took us to celebrate at a restaurant on the bank of the Danube River in Zemun — a rustic old part of town that looks like a Hungarian village — with live music and lots of happy revelers celebrating birthdays, anniversaries, and just being with friends. It was loud and happy and wonderful. The band, set on a small stage in the corner of the bright-art-covered dining room, featured an accordion player, a guitarist, and a vocalist, and they played an eclectic mix of American and British covers (sung in Serbian), Serbian pop and rock, and traditional Russian and Gypsy songs. The large table next to us, which ordered round after round of food, sang along with gusto to the Serbian songs.
We walked the cobbled streets of Zemun to the Gardoš tower, which overlooks the rivers and the city.
Gardoš tower in Zemun The thing I didn’t do that I wish I would have is explore the concrete Communist architecture of the Blokovi — the urban section of New Belgrade divided into 72 bloks. My friend Denise took a long walk exploring the oppressive buildings, the architecture of which is termed “brutalist,” and after hearing her talk about it and after seeing photographs in Discover the Grit and Glory of New Belgrade’s Communist Architecture, I regret that I didn’t carve out time to explore this fascinating part of Belgrade.
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I turned the final page last night on my third book set in South Carolina, and now I am in the home stretch of my Andrea Reads America tour of the United States. I’ve read three (or more) books from 40 states and the District of Columbia so far, and I’ve got these states left to read:
- South Dakota
- Tennessee
- Texas
- Utah
- Vermont
- Virginia
- Washington
- West Virginia
- Wisconsin
- Wyoming
I think I might actually finish in 2019. Thirty books in nine months is totally doable. Even if I take a break now and then to read Anna Karenina or books our 15 year old son recommends to me, like Challenger Deep, which I’m reading right now to celebrate this milestone of only ten states to go, I think I can finish this year. I want to aim for it.
I once speculated it would take me a decade to read three (usually more) books from each state. I’d be delighted to finish this year. I’ve read remarkable, eye-opening books, excellent new-to-me authors, and a broad spectrum of landscape, provincialism, privilege, and oppression. The more I read — especially when I throw the occasional non-US-set novel into the mix — the more it crystallizes for me that humans are the same everywhere, throughout history, no matter where they live. This is weirdly comforting to me in the same way that thinking how small and insignificant we are in the vastness of the universe is comforting. I don’t know why. Maybe because it gives a sense of proportion.
Despite the deep experience of the US I’m getting from reading all this American literature, I’m eager to read these final ten states, write them up, and be free. I have a TBR stack of “I’ll get to this when I’ve finished my project” I’ve been building up these five years. I know I want to read more Tolstoy, and I’ve got a books-recommended-as-funny-charming list I cannot wait to get to. But mostly I’m looking forward to the freedom of picking up whatever book I want, whenever I want, without the unfinished business of this reading project looming in the background.
Butterfly Mind 