Letters from Rona / Places I love / Sort by date

My mother never managed to teach me how to roll out pie crust or sew in a zipper, but thanks to her I can spot the bargains at a post-Christmas sale and beat the crowd to the only 80-percent-off sweater in a certain shade of pink---one that shows up in stores about as often as a cockatoo lands in your back yard. She knew just the right place to train me---Filene's legendary basement. [more]

Every storied house deserves a name. Think Astor Court, scene of Chelsea Clinton's wedding. Or Sissinghurst Castle, home of one of Britain's most celebrated gardens. Or Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright's cantilevered masterpiece in the leafy depths of a nature reserve. Then there's Maynard Hall, a name unheard-of even by the people who own it---a cheerful, 30-something couple who answered my knock at their door one recent weekend, just as they were rallying four kids to head off somewhere. [more]

We were dressing for a party while a summer storm drenched the city. Trees swayed and creaked in the wind; rain lashed the bedroom windows. It pelted down with such noisy, wall-beating force, I could have sworn someone was draining a bathtub on the third floor, where no tub had ever existed. "What a stinker!" I said to my husband as I clipped my favourite earrings into place. "Couldn't you swear you were standing in the middle of that rain?" [more]

Much as I've enjoyed my stay in sunny and friendly Sarasota, I'm ready to return to the rough-edged reality of winter-locked Toronto, where strangers not only won't say hello, they might snarl if they notice you smiling in their direction. What can I tell you? It's home. Here are seven home comforts I've been missing. [more]

Fernando Botero, whose paintings we viewed the other day at the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg, depicted all his human subjects as decidedly porcine and gave even the crucified Jesus multiple chins. So it was fitting that we stopped for lunch en route at Skyway Jack's, the local shrine to all things piggy: sausage gravy, pork chops, pork brains, bacon or any combination of the above, served with home fries redolent of bacon grease. [more]

You can tell quite a lot about a place from what's on offer---or is not---by way of groceries. In the Dordogne countryside, every second driveway sports a hand-lettered sign advertising homemade foie gras, but just try hunting down a liter of milk. In Sarasota, where we've rented a condo next door to Publix, it's a less toothsome story. I've never seen so much packaged food you couldn't pay me to eat. [more]

If you're not game for glitches, don't travel: something always goes wrong. Then again, other things go right in unforgettable ways. For instance, our detour to the history-drenched town of Trier, where the most extraordinary sight was the one we didn't expect---the venerated and debated local treasure that skeptics debunk as a medieval hoax and the faithful revere as the holy tunic worn by Jesus the day he was crucified. [more]

Toronto, where we live, and Sarasota, where we're spending this month, share a bond right now: in both cities the cold has everyone grousing. I headed out today in a cashmere sweater, a wool jacket and leather boots (so much for sandal fantasies). But if I'd been stuck at home, I'd have reached for my long johns and bear-paw gloves. And then, much as I hate to join the weather wusses, I'd have vented with the best of them. Bottom line: I'm in no hurry to get home. [more]

If I could be buried in P?re Lachaise Cemetery, where my husband and I once spent a drizzly afternoon communing with the famous dead of Paris, then I might find a certain allure in the prospect of my own demise. P?re Lachaise isn't one of those groomed cemeteries, every flower bed primped like a model for the runway. It's a wild, romantic place that cries out to be explored while listening to a nocturne by Chopin. [more]

My first locker room, in the basement of Oyster River Junior High School, had beige cinderblock walls and open showers that exposed your cringing, naked pre-teen body for the whole class to see. Oh, the horror! I never guessed that I would come to rely on locker rooms for solace, renewal and that special camaraderie found only where women gather naked---all ages, all sizes---with no expectation but a fleeting escape from the rigors of the day. [more]

My brain goes into spasm at the thought of living in China's biggest, bursting-at-the-seams metropolis, with its omnipresent cranes and pollution haze. Still, I have to admire the city's heritage of openness and the scope of its current ambitions. Here, a few memories I'll be sharing with friends back home. Shanghailights, you might say. [more]

Shanghai, where we've spent six brain-jangling days, is a city of 19 million in one hell of a hurry. You could argue that we've picked a bad time to come, with a World Expo set to open in less than a year and construction hoardings on every block. But it seems to me we've arrived just in time to see vanishing downtown neighbourhoods that have scarcely changed since the Communists came to power. [more]