Third time’s the charm is the adage that perfectly sums up my spring 2025 travel to Canada. For having been around the world a few times, I somewhat surprisingly had never crossed the northern border of the U.S. to visit our good-natured neighbors, even though it’s closer than other regular road trips I take with…
Tag: Explore
OBJECT THINGS STUFF
messy bits we carry around. In 10 days, my debut collection of poetry will be published & available for the world to see. But before that, some context. I have loved poetry since I was a child. My cousin, Lindsay, and I once produced a hand-illustrated, yarn-bound collection of poems based on the creek in…
New York City, New York | 2025
Generally speaking, I am not a spontaneous person. My mind doesn’t normally even consider last-minute major decision-making, particularly with travel. Sure, I have about 10 different Google flight alerts set for various destinations on any given day, but I’m never anticipating buying a ticket the moment I get a price drop email. However, every rule…
Buy the Book
A few years ago, I came across Bookshop.org. This online book retailer sources its stock from local bookstores, some of which don’t have the means to maintain their own online storefronts or might not have the ubiquitous reach that mega retailers have. Beyond the benevolent idea that my shopping would benefit small-to-medium sized businesses, I…
Book Review: Wintering
In mid-November, a friend of mine randomly said, “I have a book I think you’d like.” If you’ve ever been the recipient of that kind of statement, you may understand the slight bristling that I initially experienced. How does she know what kind of book I like to read? I thought, while also gamely writing…
Bright
The brightness of a grey winter sky is blinding.I can hardly manage a glance out of the window—not sure I want to anyway.The bleak greyness spreads its somber shadowson the brown grass and tangled yard clippingsI failed to discard at the end of summer. Yet for all the neutral colors of a seasonin its twilight,there’s…
Post Scripts
Last fall, I looked around my room and thought: wow, I really have a lot of completed works of art. There were canvases standing against almost every available wall; double and triple layered in some places. My notebook was full of finished sketches of places I had traveled. Oil paintings were carefully drying out on…
Paris, France | 2021-22
In the middle of the pandemic, when travel restrictions were fairly light, my parents took an international trip to the Caribbean. During a post-trip debrief over pizza, we collectively wondered aloud “what if we took a family trip over the Christmas holiday?” Mind you, this was mid-November. So, that didn’t leave us much time to…
Book Review: Bite by Bite
I was enamored with Aimee Nezhukumatathil ‘s book of essays World of Wonders a few years ago when I was gifted a copy, Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants style. I was encouraged to read the book, then write a little note in the front cover and pass it on to someone who I thought would…
Asheville, North Carolina | 2023
In July 2023, very shortly after traveling for 8 weeks on the International Business Institute, I took my first-ever girls group vacation to Asheville, North Carolina. Why Asheville? None of the six of us had ever been there, it was within a one-day driving distance, and seemed to offer quite a bit of variety in…
L.M.Beatty 