During this holiday week, The Common is presenting highlights from the past year. Today’s highlights come from “Essays.”
James Boo takes us on a visit to the Park Slope Coop, while Deborah Thompson trades one piece of history for another in a thrift store.
Photo from Flickr Creative Commons
KATY SIMPSON SMITH
Our silence felt happy and earned. We adventurers stared out over the red sand beach and over to the far cliffs and up the valley and all the way out across the unknowable sea. I imagined the Neolithic builders traveling here to read their fortunes in the sunset.
RO SKELTON
Ro Skelton speaks to Emily Everett about her essay “Naow’s Boutique,” which appears in The Common’s spring issue. The essay explores Ro’s time living and working in Dakar, where she formed a friendship in her neighborhood that eventually led to a sense of community, and then a community garden, and then a lifelong friendship.
ZINZI CLEMMONS
I arrive in Johannesburg, South Africa, on December 2, 2013. My father will join me in two weeks, with my brother to follow a week later. In one month, we will unveil my mother’s headstone in the township where she grew up, one year after her death.
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