My computer time tells me it's 4:31 am and I do not believe it.I know that my computer time isn't accurate, I still have to figure out why I do not want to change it. Maybe, it's reflective of the way I want time to come back an hour more? Maybe it's me wishing that we were all one hour, one year,...

I was understandably disappointed when I pulled up to the parking booth at Parque de las Cavernas del Río Camuy. “The big cave is closed until further notice,” the attendant informed me apprehensively. “The tour just goes to the sinkholes.”

She was surprised when I said it didn’t matter,...

Every country, every town, has a road or a building or a park to which a name of historical significance has been attached. As the years pass, the number of locals who remember what the name means dwindles and the transplants to the community just call it what it is, thinking little, if at all,...

The movers came Monday morning and in one astonishingly quick hour, the two men quietly hauled 20 or so boxes down the stairs and hoisted them onto the truck, wrapped furniture into brown paper and corrugated cardboard sleeves, and signed the delivery papers, leaving me with a living room full of...

Yesterday I rented a car, rolled down the windows, put on some Cuban music, followed by Ana Belen, followed by Dave Matthews, and left Viejo San Juan, headed towards the mountains of Rio Grande, where I had a date to visit with friends. I chose the long route, taking one of my favorite drives...

..."it is hard to ask it to leave."

"The American philosopher Ralph [Waldo] Emerson wrote that," Arturo said when he and Violeta came over to visit last night. We were having a spirited conversation about the troubles of colonialism and the possibility of independence in Puerto Rico, but I...

On this day in 1493, Christopher Columbus (known to the Spanish-speaking world as Cristobal Colon and to one challenged tour guide with whom I used to work as "Christopholus Columbus") dropped anchor on the western coast of Puerto Rico and stepped onto the island for the first time. It was his second...

Yesterday, I started removing artwork from the walls in my office, our bedroom, the living room, and the guest room. I went through two baskets of papers that represent at least the past ten years of our lives-- performance evaluations from past jobs, faded receipts for the digital camera and the...

...and I won't be blue without you, Puerto Rico.

Ah, yes. The annual tradition of decorating Old San Juan's numerous plazas and plazoletas has begun again, and I hate to be a scrooge, but there's something about this tradition that just makes me cranky from now until...oh...about January 15, when all...

*“Nos vamos bien” is a popular saying in Latin America, used frequently by politicians. Translated, it means “Everything’s going well” or “We’re headed in the right direction.”

The big news in Puerto Rico over the past week or so (and really, over the past century or so) has been...

“Live in the layers, not on the litter.” -Stanley Kunitz 

Tourists, I’ve noticed, spend quite a bit of time looking up. Their heads follow a predictable trajectory that begins on the dog-eared page of a guide book or the crumpled folds of a map and ends, generally with a twist or shake of...

For Arturo y Violeta, Maritza y Esteban, Robert, Cata y Camila, and, of course, for Francisco

Admit it. You have a fantasy about living on an island. Most everyone does. It’s remarkable how consistent this fantasy is from one person to the next, and the central feature, of course, is a beach. I...