Let me start the way you’re never supposed to start and the way that women always seem to. Let me start in the cliche of all cliches and the best way to make your reader remember their spinning laundry or burning toast. Let me start with an apology. I’m so sorry that what comes next is not an original idea and I’m sorry that I don’t have the words to tell it the way Joan Dideon or Alice Munro did,…
Snow is not only one of my absolute favorite things, it’s my middle name. It’s my mom’s middle name, too, and the middle name I’ve always wanted to give to any future daughter I might have. Whenever it snows it feels a little bit like it’s a present just for me. It’s not just snowing—it’s Kayla Snowing. Every night this week Prague has been dusted with snow. Four days ago was the holiday celebrating the first snow, and on that…
A package of bleach in Prague will cost you about a hundred Czech crowns. It can be purchased from any drugstore or Tesco. It won’t look like the bleach you would get back in the U.S., but maybe you’ll think it’s kind of exciting that all the little things are different here. Purple hair dye will cost another hundred crowns. While the box says purple and the people on the front have violet locks, this dye will turn your dark…
At age nine I once crawled into my mother’s bed crying because I didn’t know what I was the best at. Everyone else had their thing, I said. My brothers made movies. My cousins made music. She told me that I was a dancer; I told her that the other kids were better. She told me I was an artist; I disagreed. Eventually she told me that my thing, the thing I was best at, was that I could put…
“It’s not much farther,” Nina promises me as we climb another centuries-old cobbled hill. Thirty minutes later my hands have begun to blister from my unforgiving Czech crutches. Nina is a Prague native and student at a local university, and she doesn’t notice the sweat beading on my forehead as she rants and rails about her “almost boyfriend.” I should have listened when my program director told us how much the Czech love to walk. We’re now on our way…