“I miss the little things of home,” Katie admitted while rocking a stroller back and forth to keep the child from boredom in the park. She has been a nannie for an Italian couple for three months. She wakes early to feed the children breakfast and ends her work day by feeding the children dinner. The Italian couple wants their kids to be brought up around English.
“Things like chocolate chip cookies,” Katie declared. “You just can’t find brown sugar anywhere here.”

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Interviewer filming a child picking bread crumbs from the ground: “What message would you send the world that has abandoned you?”
Child:”Nothing. They all left us, no one stayed by our side. Al Khatib family used to be so big, but they all departed and left us here. The only thing I say to the people is may you be happy and blessed with what you have.”

The early bird is getting the worm. He is the only one I hear this early.
When I wake early I rise to the quiet, waking world, a thawing river just beginning to flow.
When I wake late, I rise to a world already in the throes of human movement, struggle, longing and tension. Traffic is buzzing, machines are cutting, neighbors are running.

The south facing wall of an old farmhouse along the Ligurian coast was two bricks thick and hundreds high. The farm was left behind, and the walls crumbled.
A broken brick from the wall was tossed into the sea by a boy whose curiosity was only to see if he could hit a floating seagull. He could not.
The brick sank to the shallows of the shore and joined the rolling and swaying movement. For twenty years it tumbled and its edges were ground smooth.
Of all the millions of glossy polished stones underneath his feet on the beach, a man stuck the most ordinary in his pocket, and there it has remained.
It’s a reminder.
His terra-cotta stone was once something else.
Whenever he overthinks something or puts too much emphasis on his own existence, he reaches into his pocket and rubs the red stone between his thumb and fingers. He reminds himself that none of what matters to him now will matter one day.