A New Shape of Happiness

Of course, the question of happiness has taken on new significance and difficulty for me over the past 15 months. But I have found that I can feel happy since Bill died, though it takes on a new kind of shape without him. Being with my four children always gives me a...

Ukraine is Not a World Away from Davidson

The Krimon family and Margo Williams. Back in the early 1990s, Davidson College joined in a consortium of colleges that welcomed a wave of students from the former Soviet Union countries to study in our country. Happily, for the college and the town, our two students...

Lilacs

My husband died in March. On what would have been our 49th wedding anniversary, I received his last order of roses, with a daisy in the middle. He asked our son to order them and told him exactly what he wanted. The roses got me to thinking about how he loved flowers....

The Great Burami Oasis

Once, we visited an ancient oasis city, called Al Ain. It is about 80 miles due east of Abu Dhabi, into the heart of the desert and on the edge of some craggy mountains. We drove up one of those mountains, Jebel Haffit, and saw the apricot-colored desert spread out...

Esse Quam Videri: To Be, Rather Than To Seem.

Esse Quam Videri. To Be, Rather Than To Seem. This is the state motto of North Carolina. And I got to thinking about it after last week’s election, one in which we were barraged with ads and videos and Facebook pages and Tweets and news reports and television, all of...