I was about to drink my disgusting laxative tonight, in preparation for my first colonoscopy tomorrow, when I received an email telling me that a healthy friend was rushed to the hospital Friday for a crisis that landed her in Intensive Care. It sure put a different...
A friend shared this video the other day, which I found both astonishingly beautiful and terrifying. It’s the largest glacier calving event ever filmed, in which a mass of ice the size of Manhattan breaks away from Greenland to collapse into the ocean. Perhaps the...
When I was 36, I spent a month in Spain, and I never regretted that I missed running with the bulls in Pamplona. But today I heard the below interview with travel blogger Jeannie Mark, known as the Nomadic Chick, and began to wonder if I've spent my life being too...
This is a story about the death of a relationship...with an airline. But it requires me to briefly include the death of my Mom - that's what I called the grandma who raised me. On May 29, I phoned Mom and for the first time in my life she had no idea who I was. She'd...
Wednesday, May 7, 2008 Last night, Steph and I were more lost than we’ve been yet on this road trip, when our car tripped over the brick and mortar of Saint Louis, Missouri’s oldest district: Laclede’s Landing, perched on the Mississippi River. As sunset bathed the...
Heading south on Route 66 from Springfield, Illinois, Stephanie and I take a detour at Glenarm to see an old covered bridge to nowhere. The red, wooden, barnlike structure with the white-fenced ramp was built in 1880. If you've watched The Bridges of Madison County,...
“We swear you’ll thank us for this,” is what Lonely Planet said. The travel book described it, quite simply, as one of Bali’s most sacred Hindu temples, and it turned out to be, quite simply, the opposite. Pura Lempuyang sits high on a mountain overlooking the Bali...
Around noon, an aging sedan rolled up. A skinny, baby-eyed girl-woman got out, stepped up to the courtyard gate, and gave me a puzzled smile through the bars. She had long, metallic-red hair, mod side-bangs, and fluffy white ankle boots. “Sara?” I asked. She widened...
I woke to the safe sounds of a gas burner igniting, a pan shifting, an egg sizzling. It was only then that a rooster started crowing somewhere in Colonia del Carmen. Perhaps he sets his clock by Carmela. I lingered in bed, until I heard 69-year-old Carmela and her...
As Patricia and David had promised, their mother didn’t live far across the river from El Paso, Texas. After David drove through downtown Juárez, he spent five minutes winding through dark neighborhoods before turning into Carmela’s driveway. He unlocked a padlocked...
Cara Lopez Lee is the author of They Only Eat Their Husbands. She’s a winner of The Moth StorySLAM and performs in many storytelling shows, including Unheard L.A., and Strong Words. Her writing appears in such publications as Los Angeles Times, Manifest-Station, and Writing for Peace. She’s a traveler, swing dancer, and baker of pies. Cara and her husband live in the beach-town of Ventura, California, where they enjoy tending their Certified Wildlife Habitat full of birds.
