It took only a couple of days to understand, as my friend and I went door to door after school, collecting old newspapers. It was a tradition at school, to collect paper from our neighbors, and give the money from the sales to charity. To add some incentive to the…

It was a short walk down a slope, a rare outing for my father who has been house-bound for the past year. Out in the open, away from home, we were free to explore what was around us. We examined how the roof of a parking shed had been constructed…

It’s early September, and the weather feels like the peak of summer: hot, humid, and very wet. The roads are more crowded, and so are the trains. Parents dash to work after rushing their children to school, and ponderous school buses stop dutifully every few streets. Everyone is back from…

My hand shivered a little, in excitement, and a little fear. It had been a long time since I held a brush in my hand. A volunteer meeting that I almost missed, a chance reading of a syllabus, all led to a water-color class that I enrolled in, on a…

The woods, they sometimes mock me. “City dweller,” they say, “get used to our rambling paths.” Born and raised in a city, and now living in sanitized suburbia, rambling paths are not my norm. The city can be harsh in its own way, but is usually predictable. Stairs, whether indoors…

We all have stores where we like to browse; my own favorite is a plant nursery, followed a close second, by an art material store. I enter into some sort of a delirious coma as I walk into a nursery, and hours slip by in minutes, as I stare at…

Spring knocks, hesitantly. Cold wintry days alternate with warm ones, sudden bursts of rain with sun. Timid steps around the garden reveal that the silver catkins of the Pussy Willow have ripped open into yellow stamens, ready to cast their pollen into the skies. From a distance, they look like…

At the beginning of March, when everything outside seems to be at a standstill, one plant has started blooming. The pussy willow, the first to flower this year, is new to my garden, having arrived late last fall, when we purchased it during an end-of-the season sale at the local…

The streets are bustling with activity by the time my morning walks in the neighborhood park end. Traffic is whizzing by, school children are rushing, bus-stops are full of people in a hurry to get to work, and construction activity on the metro has restarted: all of which combine to…