“Shall I bring Jigsaws? I might be able to fit two in my backpack.”, she asked.
“Perfect, I have some as well. We can exchange!”, I replied.

Little did I know that this naive message exchange would turn out to be one of my worst nightmares. It was mid-June and the measures had relaxed ever so slightly, when my friend Elena texted me to say that she was going on an allowed bike ride. She suggested exchanging puzzles, and so it happened. I got to see her from a distance — mask included — for some limited, yet very much needed, human interaction. We traded puzzles, disinfected them, and parted ways. Continue reading →

My husband and I live in a fourth floor apartment, with roughly 20 meters separating us from the row of apartment buildings in front of us. During the uneventful days of the confinement—which in Spain meant you could not leave your apartment except for necessary errands—every small thing became an event. Looking at the same scenery day after day one starts noticing details one hadn’t noticed before—the type of plants someone grows, the color of the brick of a certain building, and, the surprising number of pets inhabiting those buildings. Continue reading →

As, hopefully, these upside-down times have a beginning, a middle and an end, I’m choosing to write about three things in those categories I enjoyed a lot this year. Continue reading →

2020 has been a bit of a grind, to say the least. Every morning we wake up to devastating news about the decline of our planet, the various threats to our health, racial injustice, inequality, police brutality, politics, wars, the economy, J. K. Rowling being an idiot. But against all odds, there are some things that keep us going even when everything around us starts to come crashing down.

And it appears that when it comes to self preservation my natural instinct is to go out and look at birds.

Coots actually have way larger feet than this.