cultivating the beautiful ordinary by sharing our tales and our tables
On the morning before the rest of our group arrives, Tracy and I follow Google Maps through the twisting, narrow, congested streets of old Istanbul to a cafe I’ve found. I want a famous Turkish breakfast spread. The kind with multiple breads, meats, cheeses, olives, honeys, and jams. The kind that makes you linger into…
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We cross the Bosphorus Strait via a steamer ferry that has been running nonstop for decades, so we can wander through my old neighborhood. Europe to Asia. Two continents split a city that knows more splits than I can count. On the hill above, the newest and biggest mosque is rivaled in height by the…
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First, I wrote Leyla. She was a teen I thought my own teen girls might like. Leyla was for them. A Turkish girl, wandering the old city, who falls into an epic adventure to uncover a secret passed among women for two millennia. As she learns to embrace her own strength, she must also accept…
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I have a memory of belonging, of feeling at home.
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It is approximately 1:00 am when the bus pulls into the service center and I file out behind the women wearing headscarves. I am a spectacle, to be sure. I pay to use the Turkish toilet, remembering the awkward squat this set up requires and one particular time on a ferry boat while 7 months…
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I miss my son. College is a brutal separation and makes me more sentimental than I have ever been. Scrolling through photos taken during our summer vacation, feeling a bit weepy over the ones with him and me, I am full of gratitude. Beyond the memories of the adventure, I marvel at the textures, the…
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Above my desk hangs a framed black and white photo of two sets of feet. I took it on our first vacation as a family of three. My husband’s feet are covered in white sand and my one-year-old’s chubby toes sit atop. The vacation was paid for by parents and preceded our move overseas by…
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I woke in a sweat and hurled myself into my husband’s arms in the kitchen. When had I last remembered a dream so vividly and when had I last felt such panic and fear?
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The call to prayer echoed down the canyon between Istanbul and Ankara as we sat in our circle high in the mountains.
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In 2012, for one week in November, I checked the international ticker on CNN every couple of hours.
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