What I notice immediately—after the stifling heat, the humidity that fogs glass, the stray dogs—are the temples. They are part of the Thai landscape, like the rubber trees, the wild green jungles, the red mountains of the north. Each temple is unlike the other, constructed by the community’s money and faith and devotion. According to a count done in 2004, there are well over 40,000 Buddhist temples in Thailand, 40,000 temples in a country that can fit into Texas.
My family and I recently relocated to Brazil, the motherland I left over twenty years ago. Our reasons for moving were whimsical, devised in the middle of a torturous Wisconsin winter: the lure of adventure, the tropical climate and, our one practical excuse, the opportunity for my husband and daughter to master Portuguese – a language I considered my own.
We had this landlord, tanned and wiry, creepy, and he always had this look like what the hell?
He would park his truck sometimes out front and wait there all day. One time he’d gone fishing I guess, so he left a bag of fish in the bushes by the mailbox. Nobody knows why.
By JASON TUCKER
Your mother and I were made in places that will never be your place. Northern she and Southern I are about to start raising an Upper Midwestern you. At least while these jobs hold out.
By KEANE SHUM
There used to be an actual line. That we had to actually wait in. We used to line up from the elevator bank in the Harbour View Hotel across the bridge and over to the Great Eagle Centre, or double-backed towards Central Plaza, and we used to wait.We waited in the balmy near-summer heat if it was the prom after-party, or in the wincing wet cold when we were back from college for the holidays. We waited, we paid cover, we had tickets. We were young.
By HANNAH GERSEN
We show up at Mayflower Beach at ten one August morning, and the parking attendant, a tanned teenaged girl in a gold tee shirt, tells us we’re too late, the lot is full. To ensure a spot, it’s best to come around 8:00 a.m., or even earlier.
By CHRIS KELSEY
The first time I visited Copenhagen I decided to quit my job. I had spent five years working nearly 60 hours per week as an editor, I never took vacation, I was struggling with finances, and I was deeply unhappy. My parents, who were closing in on retirement, had been to Ireland not long before and the travel bug for Europe had struck. Now they chose Denmark. To my good fortune, they treated their three adult children to this August trip.
By ELLIOTT HOLT
My friend K. and I traveled to St. Petersburg on the overnight train from Moscow, where I lived then. She had come from New York to visit me. It was December, 1997, and the cold was brutal, but you have to see the Hermitage, I said. So we took the train north and then, at dawn, made our way to the international youth hostel. It was the first one in Russia—opened in 1992—and like every hostel I’d visited, it was full of backpackers eager to tell us how much of the world they had seen. No one’s hostile in a hostel, I said to K. She and I had been out of college for just a couple of years; our fellow travelers were about our age. Many of them were from Australia and New Zealand. At breakfast that first morning— a room with tentative light and forlorn bowls of muesli—we met a young Japanese-Finnish woman. (Her parents were Japanese, but she’d been raised in Finland.) She had traveled from Helsinki, she told us, to photograph corpses.
A handmade dress passed down
from your mother finds space
in the cedar chest at the foot
of the bed. The chest, a relic
of your father’s, bore a new
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