Catching up

Since my last post, the plumeria bloomed and my granddaughter was born. We made it through the entire fire season last year without a significant blaze, which made me realize how much the fear of fire has come to dominate our travel plans. In early April, we visited the Portuguese island of Madeira and my husband is one month post-op neck surgery today, doing well.

On the writing front, I reviewed Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water in the Winter 2024 Threepenny Riview. The review only appears in the print edition. Although I admire Verghese, I ended up with mixed feelings about this book. He wrote about his family, Christians, technically outside the caste system but with Brahmin privileges, in Kerala, and a woman married at twelve, as his grandmother was. So his treatment of those two problematic institutions, the caste system and child marriage, is rather gentler than I would have wished.

I also participated in a Symposium on Anger, in the Spring 2024 edition of The Threepenny Review. A few of those short essays are online. Anger essay

We are enjoying a chilly spring. The plumeria doesn’t tolerate temperatures below fifty, so I kept it inside until a few weeks ago.( This week’s forecast still includes night time lows of 49.) It looks like a stick again, entirely dormant, perhaps due to a mis-guided pruning attempt. I watch gardening videos for instructions and they make it sound so easy…