In Ireland with Desmond O'Grady Remembering a day off the coast of southern Ireland  … ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin Gale force winds, rain, twenty-six-foot seas—we’d hit a bit of a rough spot in the weather on the Irish Riviera, the promoters’ somewhat euphemistic appellation for the strip of resort towns—Youghal, Ardmore, Dungarvan, Cobh and Ballycotton—that dot Ireland’s southern coast and draw travelers to their lovely beaches and coastlines. Not that this put a damper on our adventures. My travel companions and I had spent most of our days in landlubberly pursuits, crawling...

Palm Desert, California: December 22, 2012 ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin Spectacular and panoramic morning at 6:30 a.m. on the balcony of my villa at Palm Desert’s Desert Springs Marriott and here I was getting set to rhapsodize about the snow-dusted San Jacinto Mountains in the distance, the towering palms, the Mary-and-Joseph-gee-whiz-I-can’t-believe-it’s-almost-Christmas baby-blue sky with its little collar of cottony cloud when I realized I didn’t have a journal with me. Drat. It took me a while to remember that I did have my laptop. That’s good. So here I sit punching keys, writing about the...

Noche de Los Muertos ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin Remembering a dark night in San Francisco … We are pressed, our backs to the wall, in Balmy Alley, a bottleneck of a back street in San Francisco’s Mission District, as the dead drift by. Skeletons on stilts, in bridal gowns, playing drums in steel bands—Los Muertos, The Dead—proceed in almost single-file procession through a cramped alleyway that feels like the birth canal to another world....

Time Traveling through the Perseid Shower ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin “Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise again in light. I have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.” –Sarah Williams It’s August; the Perseid Shower is just about due, and I am time traveling again. Ever since humans first looked up and beheld the night sky, we have used the stars to orient ourselves both physically and psychologically. The stars were moving, we used to think, around the earth; but it is we who are traveling, spinning–wildly in the context of stellar time. The stars and the silence...

Embracing Fat Tuesday ©Linda Watanabe McFerrin NEW ORLEANS — PINOCCHIO zooms by on roller skates, thin, hairy legs protruding from green lederhosen. Three Elvises swivel past, hips rotating like long-playing records. A besequined, masked stranger raises his wine glass and blows me a kiss. Scandalous. Ridiculous. Crazy. Taboo. It’s Fat Tuesday – Mardi Gras, the most delightfully wicked time of the year and the last chance to be naughty before buckling into Lent’s iron girdle, the 40 days of abstinence and contrition that precede Easter. As a good Catholic girl, I remember Ash...