The U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan over two years ago, but I still receive messages and phone calls from my cousins and friends on a monthly basis, asking me to help them get out because they can’t live in fear and hiding anymore. I do not hear from them directly when their houses get raided by the...

It’s difficult, impossible really, to live on acreage in a rural place and draw a firm line. This side: orderly, civilized, tidy, clean. That side: the wilderness. Some days, you mow the patch of lawn in front of the woods, admire its smoothness, its edge of sweet clover left for the bees.

Among the things I like about Thoreau is that he was born in 1817 and died in 1862 at the same age my father did, one hundred years later. So Thoreau’s lifespan is familiar to me. I grew up ten minutes from Walden Pond—we all called it Lake Walden. My family had gone...

The landscape is legend, each valley and hill the stuff of myth. Here, below the tombs that honeycomb the cliffs of Lycia’s second- largest city, Pinara, says the Iliad, roamed the raging Chimaera, “a bane to many men.” There, in the port city of Patara, Santa Claus, or Saint Nicholas of Myra, was born. Shh, listen: there sings the...

For a long time, I can’t understand why my grandmother Meropi hides her Bible under her pillow when the doorbell rings. Later, I learn what it means to live a secret Christian life in an atheist country like Albania...

As a child, I wasn’t particularly interested in the idea of treasure. I suppose I didn’t believe back then that there was anything so marvelous to be found. Instead of pirates who spent their time searching, I thrilled to the story of Billy the Kid, who spent his on the run, hiding. Only years later...