by Cheri Eplin If it takes a village to raise a child, then it takes a group of 29 Rotarians—and one sister-in-law willing to help translate—to change the lives of 143 patients, mostly children, from the university city of Pereira, Colombia. Rotaplast, a program that provides surgical intervention to eliminate untreated cleft lips and palates,…
by Gloria Fallon My friend Patty and I didn’t say much as we loaded our luggage into the rental car at Keflavik Airport. We’d just landed in Iceland, and already we were silenced by the landscape. “It looks like we’ve landed on Mars,” Patty finally said as we took it all in. Since we met…
by Holly Burns I’ve always been fearless on flights. My earliest memory is of sitting curled in an airplane seat thousands of feet above Paris, watching and waiting for the ground to get closer as the plane descended. I’ve flown through Thai thunderstorms with even the flight attendants screaming and clutching one another through every…
by Kristin Pedroja People usually associate Venice with romance, Casanova, and the melodious lull of gondoliers paddling lovers through the night. Whatever! I find Venice to be one of the most inspiring and fantastic places to visit, either alone or with girlfriends. I just got back from another precious forty-eight hours in this amazing place…
Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about art. I’ve been painting large 4-foot by 4-foot canvasses covered with layers of electric, abstract colors, and each day that I can, I turn off the phone and court a kind of tingling surrender to hues, shapes and textures as they pass through me. What’s stunning is that…
by Jennifer Anthony “I think that I shall never see a poem lovely as a tree.” Alfred Joyce Kilmer’s Trees has been a bit of a joke in my family ever since one of my brothers, then a shy teenager, was coerced into reciting it in front of our church’s congregation. We were young and…
by Cat Hubka I got the idea to travel long ago, on the back of my father’s motorcycle. My father was in the midst of his mid-life crisis, a spiritual and emotional breakdown that had flung our family to the winds, when he purchased a mid-sized Yamaha and began exploring the high country of Colorado…