Tag Archives: travel

The Guest

Posted on March 19, 2023 by jillbpearlman

For three weeks, I was a guest: to different showersAnd toilet flushes in the West, to coffee houses, to apps,to rosemary as box shrub.  A guest to my suitcase.  To hot tubs and skin in the garden of my tiny cottage. Guest to … Continue reading →

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Bastille to Puritan Village: Strange Magic

Posted on October 30, 2022 by jillbpearlman

Each time, after countless trips, still strange magic.Hours ago, we were eating croissants in the sun, looking at the soft green column of the Bastille, the genie de la Liberté, golden wings aloft, still leaping.Today I wake up to crisp carpeting … Continue reading →

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What Asked to Come Back from the Trip

Posted on December 12, 2021 by jillbpearlman

One charming cliche pops up when you are going on a trip — people ask, can you pack me in your suitcase?  When you’re returning, it’s a moot point.  Or is it?    I wouldn’t have known it when I … Continue reading →

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Place, No Passport Needed

Posted on December 5, 2021 by jillbpearlman

The house of my recurring dreams so real yet nowhere I’ve ever beena place to put up my imaginary feeteach night a new set of contextsrelations to be worked out in my lucid jetlagged stateI ask little of this curious placea … Continue reading →

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It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane…Travel Again

Posted on October 17, 2021 by jillbpearlman

Stop doing something, then start again to incur wonder. I.e., travel! You give your suitcase to strangers and pick it up on a Mediterranean island? You fly in the belly of a mechanical bird? Suddenly you’re above the clouds where … Continue reading →

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Santa Fe on Thinner Oxygen

Posted on July 11, 2021 by jillbpearlman

How rare to travel as an amateur or emigrant, so ignorant of a well-trod place that you let the place’s magic play with your “free gaze.”   I, Rhode Islander, arrive with little knowledge of New Mexico.  D.H. Lawrence, Georgia … Continue reading →

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Petersburg’s Fresh Waters

Posted on October 25, 2019 by jillbpearlman

Standing by the river Neva, wanting to compose poetry in St Petersburg, I couldn’t hear beyond the lines of great poets – Akhmatova, Blok, Tsvetaeva, Mandelstam. History dominates voice, especially in Russia. The Revolution, Stalin’s terrors, the siege, all produced … Continue reading →

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Shape-Shifting in Thessaloniki

Posted on August 15, 2017 by jillbpearlman

The Thessaloniki experience has to include both ghosts and crowds.  Walking through the old souks on a mid-August holiday, its corridors are full of shadows, smells but no people, plastic bags flapping on the skeletal rafters.  This is a good … Continue reading →

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January 20, 2017

Posted on January 27, 2017 by jillbpearlman

January 20 Something is happening back in Washington, though we are 40,000 feet above the Mediterranean. We are rising high, the scalloped edge of the Holy Land a mere hem below, through unraveling skeins of clouds, the hush unearthly. It … Continue reading →

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Summer Junk

Posted on August 19, 2015 by jillbpearlman

There are elements of summer travel that consume the intellect – history and literary settings and reevaluation of the real from the media images we’ve been fed.   There are things that consume the body – sun, mosquitoes.   And … Continue reading →

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