By Mary Jo McConahay
Floating in a Beat-Up Canoe
Yellow-headed swallows dipped in and out of thick mist resting on the river. That fog probably followed the water’s curve for miles, I thought, maybe the whole length of Belize. I won’t see a thing from the boat.
Atop a high bank overlooking the Macal, I [...]

by Jeanne Stark
A story of war, lost love and hidden keepsakes.
Her name was Michiko Araki and she was my father’s girlfriend.  That’s all I know, but here is their story.
My father was 25 years old when the USS Talladega sailed into port in Honshu, Japan in October, 1945.  Hiroshima was a pile of rubble.  [...]

by Angie Chuang
Two sisters-in-law in Kabul unveil the domestic world of post-Taliban Afghan women to me — and try to marry me off to one of their own.
The yellow door was made of wood that felt too light.  Every time we, the Americans – Laila, Stephanie, and I – swung it open, we [...]

by Dominick Domingo
A Guide to Cultural Egocentrism
If I’d been smart, I would have studied Spanish instead of French. That way, I would have had an endless surplus of busboys and valets with whom to practice. Not to mention the majority of my tricks. Instead I am reduced to eavesdropping on strangers [...]

by Patricia Dreyfus
Twins: Double Trouble or Twice Blessed
The heart shaped continent, the site of Eden where human life began, Africa, the center of the Earth. As I step from the plane in Lagos, Nigeria, I hear the music of Africa, high and tinkling, beating and throbbing like my pulse. I smell Africa, [...]

by Melanie Hamlett
She didn’t realize how long she’d been single until Jesus touched her during the Last Supper.
As fifty other tourists and I entered the cave, a man dressed in a pharaoh’s outfit handed us each a cracker and a teeny-tiny wooden cup of grape juice, which looked like a shot glass from [...]

by Eleanor Stanford
An American family with three young kids moves to Salvador, Brazil in search of adventure
I stepped out of the Luis Carlos Magalhães airport, sleepless and disoriented, into what I imagined as my new life, and flopped down on the pile of suitcases to nurse the baby. My husband rifled through [...]

by Gloria Kirchheimer
The author’s ancestral homeland in present-day Turkey turns out to be startlingly familiar and shockingly alien at the same time.
Was Homer blind?  I hope not.  Did he really live in Smyrna in the eighth or ninth century?  If he lived in the city now called Izmir, then his view, assuming he [...]

by Colette O’Connor
My parents’ marriage, on public display in Paris, possibly is saved in the bed department of Bazaar Hotel de Ville.
In the bed department of Bazaar Hôtel de Ville, Mademoiselle in charge of duvets pulls a particularly puffy one from the display of every weight—summer, autumn, Arctic—and offers a feel to [...]

by Margaret Wagner
Grandma Taught Me to Step Up by Stepping In
I sat on a stone bench outside the ruins of Ephesus, Turkey with my 85-year old Grandma.  She was a petite woman of 5’4,” hair barely peppered with silver and delicate hands that somehow retained a refined air despite decades of kneading [...]