Category: Your Stories

  • Uphill Battle

    When we travel, we tend to seek out hikes or climbs to elevated spots – like church spires and domes, lighthouses, cliff walks, and waterfalls.  Pretty much every time, someone says to us, “keep going, it’s worth it.” Likewise, we’ve passed on this message. On a particularly strenuous and long hike to a waterfall recently,…

  • Competing Interests

    I was traveling this past week and it was so refreshing to see people coming together everywhere to watch the World Cup matches.  A small crowd of us shared a phone feed of the game on the jet way boarding the plane. At another point, walking through downtown NYC to dinner, I saw people crowded…

  • A toast to new friends

    We headed out to dinner in a residential area in Stockholm, looking for an authentic place away from the tourist scene. We found a Greek restaurant and bonded quickly with our young waiter and his older colleague, a man old enough to be his grandfather. We joked and traded stories about where we are from…

  • Sanctioned Graffiti

    After dinner out, I discovered something beautiful in the tiny women’s restroom of all places. On three of the four walls, above a white chair rail, the restaurant owners had put chalkboard paint on walls that could have been any color. Their patrons took it from there, handwriting encouraging messages in chalk to fill every…

  • Rescuing orphaned baby deer

    A car hit a deer at the front of our neighborhood last Friday night. On Saturday morning, the deer’s dead body lay tucked into the bushes near a perimeter fence. Soon after, a nearby neighbor heard a baby deer crying in the woods and (assuming its mama was the deer who’d been hit) wondered if…

  • Flying umbrellas

    While traveling abroad, we were in an urban public square enjoying the scenery. On the promenade area nearby, vendors offered casual food. The weather was beautiful, so we decided to order wine and a pizza. Just as we were sitting down, a strong wind gust blew an umbrella stand over onto a table of about…

  • Look for the helpers

    As I left the grocery store last Saturday afternoon, there was a slowdown getting out the door. An elderly man in front of me inched along leaning heavily on his walker. In front of him, his wife pushed a cart full of food that she was managing, but slowly. They were almost to their car…

  • Seagull on his head

    My husband and I walked through a beautiful park today in a very swanky part of Helsinki that’s popular with tourists and locals. We stopped to look at a bronze statue of a famous person there and were laughing light-heartedly at a seagull perched right on its head. My husband joked that it was called…

  • Talking to a human

    I was trying to register for a summer class online but the system kept giving me errors. Finally, I called the number on their website and got to talk to a lovely woman who happily answered all of my questions and offered to fix many of the problems from her end. It was great talking…

  • Double-parked

    I was at the grocery tonight and watched a woman pull into the busy parking lot and park straddling two prime spots. She got out of her car and actually looked back at her parking. She seemed to think it was fine and continued into the store.  It’s hard to believe people can be this self-centered. Especially…