This year I set up my tomatoes in an Earthbox. I have grown vegetables in containers now for about five years, mostly in five gallon buckets from the home improvement stores. I have a new condo with a patio and I wanted a more elegant looking container garden. I admit that I bought the […]
Tasting Notes – Niche Chocolate
One of the delights from my recent trip to Ghana was the discovery of a new chocolate brand, Niche Chocolate. I probably would have ignored it at the store were it not for the ginger on the wrapping calling my name. Why not, right? So I bought a single bar of the ginger flavour and […]
Why I love football (soccer)
I love football and it’s that time again. Less than a week. World Cup 2018. Except this time I am not going to Russia. World Cup 2010 South Africa and World Cup 2014 Brazil were awesome, but no, you can’t make me go to Russia. I’m not going. But I’m going to enjoy the next […]
Burning Man Exhibit At Renwick Gallery
The first Burning Man in 1986 saw Larry Harvey and his friend Jerry James building and burning an effigy of a man on San Francisco’s Baker Beach. There are multiple explanations for the why. Since then Burning Man has become a global community and a unique creative festival that attracts over 75,000 people to Nevada’s […]
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
The Underground Railroad, published in 2016, is a critically acclaimed novel by Colson Whitehead. It won the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction, the 2017 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and it was long-listed for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. The Underground Railroad tells the story of Cora, an […]
The Pearl That Broke Its Shell by Nadia Hashimi
Nadia Hashimi is an Afghan-American paediatrician who in this her début novel tells the story of two young Afghan women, Rahima and her great-great grandmother Shekiba, a century apart (2007 – 1900), united by gender, who at some point in their lives have each become a bacha posh, a girl who dresses as a boy […]
All That Is by James Salter
Another book by a man written for men it seems. All That Is starts near the end of World War II where Philip Bowman is a junior naval officer en route to Japan suffering kamikaze assaults. We follow him as he returns a hero to the United States, enrolls at Harvard University, and becomes a […]
Rubber Plantations in Ghana Replacing Food Crops
The last time I visited my father’s farm in Nzema I was twelve or thirteen years old. I don’t remember any mention of rubber plantations. Back then my parents would go to Nzema for the weekend leaving us in Accra and would return with the pickup bed loaded with palmnut, plantain, cassava, yam, snails, and […]
Nzulezo – The Ghanaian Village On Stilts
Nzulezo or Nzulezu literally translates to “on the water” in Nzema. This potential UNESCO World Heritage site is famously known as “the village on stilts”. My maternal great-great grandfather Kpole is from this village. In fact, when my parents took my sisters there last autumn, they met a relative. Now I’m in Ghana and it’s […]
A Whirlwind Visit to Ghana Ten Years Later
Oh my! Where did time go? I remember leaving Ghana in 2008, thinking that the next time I came it would be with my husband. I was tired of the constant references to my being in my late twenties and unmarried. I did not want to give anyone reason to try to set me up. […]
A lover of mangoes. A woman - smart, without pretense, lefthanded, Afropolitan - navigating this thing called life. An unapologetic believer in social justice and karma. Choosing to radiate positive energy and be true to myself. Here, my musings.