Greetings from Thailand!
Get inspired by stories and reflections on travel as an experience, a lifestyle, and an identity.
Oh, I should have known.
Or more correctly, I should have checked. It was the first flower I ever gave someone - and yet, there’s me, with no knowledge of plants or flowers at all. I should have known I’d get myself into trouble. Perhaps someone who grew up surrounded by flowers, steeped in both their nature in the wild and their meanings in the human world, would have spotted my blunder in advance.
A couple of weeks ago, The Atlantic ran an article by writer Ellen Cushing, who documented what the pandemic had done to her everyday behaviour. It’s a worrying read - but considering how weird and disruptive this last year has been, you may be able to identify with it (and with its subheading, “We have been doing this so long, we’re forgetting how to be normal”).
Cushing recounts her increasingly swiss-cheesed memory:
“The forgetting feels like someone is taking a chisel to the bedrock of my brain, prying everything loose.