marmalade and honey

The breakfasts and the long empty tropical beaches are what I remember. In the late 80's I went to the Bungalow Beach Hotel in the Gambia for the first time. It was August, during the rainy season, off-season for tourists. The nearly deserted beaches were excellent for long walks and even when the rain came it was a fine rain that didn't keep us from the beach. The breakfasts were hard rolls and butter, marmalade and honey, Nescafé and evaporated milk with sugar for a poor man's café au lait. I think there was Laughing Cow cheese, too, though that is not what I remember. I did learn my love for marmalade at the Bungalow Beach Hotel, but any breakfast tastes better when it's lazy. I was back many times after that, usually as part of a big group for our spiritual conferences, but it is those first lazy mornings that stay in my memory. My traveling companion, David Cuthbert, is long back in Europe, and married now, the last I heard. He did try his hand at making marmalade once we were back in Guinea. It was OK, but it wasn't that English marmalade in a lazy off-season hotel.

boy in the woods

the neverending story

The kids and I just finished watching the magic of The NeverEnding Story.

"In the beginning, it's always dark."

the kingfisher's wing

.... After the kingfisher’s wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.

- T.S. Eliot, "Burnt Norton"

the kittens would hide

The kittens would hide behind the bales of hay in the front room of the cowshed. The sunshine through the dusty windows to the south caught the hay dust dancing slowly in the still air of the shed. I think the cows were gone by then. I was still very young. The shed and the kittens have been gone now for thirty years.

wand flowers

This summer has been the summer of wand flowers and bumblebees. Salimatou planted wand flowers outside our kitchen window. The bumblebees and the slightest breeze have the pink and white flowers dancing from dawn to dusk.

blue

I was driving home from Dalaba in the Fouta Djalon highlands of Guinea late one afternoon. The sun was setting behind me as I rounded the 90 degree turn at the hotel and dance hall at the turn-off to Timbi Madina, about halfway home to Labé. A kingfisher came in from the right and swooped high in the air, the sun catching all his colors in a moment of vivid and breathtaking beauty.

In the next moment, the bird dived directly into the grill of my truck and died there.