Blog

Crucitas: The Conversation We Still Need to Have

A few days ago, Glenda Umaña and Hugo Famanía interviewed me to hear my views on the environmental situation in Crucitas, as part of a report to be broadcast by a Panamanian media outlet. We sat by the lake in La Paz Park. A ray of sunlight illuminated my face. “It...

A Promise of Relief

On Wednesday nights we play basketball as if we were still twenty. We arrive with our enthusiasm intact, we play a first warm-up game in slow motion, and for two hours we try to convince our bodies that technique and memory are enough. Of course, the body disagrees. A...

Milkweeds, Caterpillars, and Monarchs

Then came the warning, delivered with One Sunday, like so many others, we arrived for breakfast at my in-laws’ house. As usual, I stepped out into the garden to admire the plants growing as if all the lushness of the tropics had been condensed into that small corner...

In praise of insomnia

One of my earliest childhood memories is marked by the battle with insomnia. On those long nights, my mother, patient and resigned, would prepare me a cup of hot milk that she would baptize with a splash of wine. The remedy worked like the chorus of a Julio Iglesias...

Caring has a cost

The Bible relates that, before and during the crucifixion, Jesus was accompanied by three women: Mary, his mother, Mary Magdalene, and Mary of Clopas. It is not surprising that, two millennia later, the image of a caregiver is still feminine: a mother, an aunt, a...

In Praise of the Fly

Once, for four or five weeks, I was a fly nest. This happened when I was ten years old, during a vacation with my maternal grandparents, on a farm in San Carlos de Alajuela. Those were days of getting up early and milking cows next to spotted horses, small calves and...