My first year in Europe, I moved when the seasons changed. I spent autumn in Castilla-La Mancha, winter in Barcelona, spring at the foot of the Pyrenees. I had moved to Spain to apprentice with winemakers, and I was following the cycle of a grapevine. Late fall, when I arrived, was time for cellar work: bottling, racking, packing, and shipping. In February, when the ground had frozen, we pruned the vines with electric clippers. Springtime was for removing excess leaves from the vine; the sticky summer months were for watering and upkeep. Long-awaited was September, time of vendimia—the harvest.
By Khaddafina Mbabazi, Illustrations by Keith Negley
September 8, 2020
At Heathrow, three hours before her flight to Boston, Thandi was in one of the shower rooms below the Galleries lounge in Terminal 5. A previous tenant—someone who, at some point in the day, had been in there before her, before every inch of the shower room was cleaned, its towels and various amenities replaced—had left a trace of themselves; the radio on, the dial turned to Classic FM.
In the fall of 2015, Germany designated Sumte, population 102, as a sanctuary for nearly 800 refugees. What followed was a living experiment in the country’s principles.
The nation of Azerbaijan, wedged into the Caucasus Mountains between Russia and Iran, is small, geopolitically vulnerable, and relatively new to the contrivance of nationhood. Most of its history has been spent on the fringes of someone else’s empire; millennia of successive imperial occupations ended with the crumbling of the Soviet Union, and, over the twenty-five years since, Azerbaijanis have been experimenting with novel forms of national pride.
Father Johan climbed up first, and I hoisted his rifle and backpack up to him. The tower, a box on stilts, was walled with rugs and blankets strewn about, but the cold cut everything, including my oversized boots and borrowed wool socks. It overlooked a clearing where we dumped food for the boars. Hunting wild boar without dogs means you set the table and hope the guests arrive. In the meantime, you wait.
From late 1933 to New Year’s Day 1935, Patrick Leigh Fermor walked from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul with little more than Army surplus clothes, The Oxford Book of English Verse, and some empty notebooks in his rucksack.
A few words are in order about this essay's title. It is pilfered from that great American man of letters, Edmund Wilson, who used it for his collection of American writing, The Shock of Recognition.
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