December in Bangkok feels almost magical. The temperature drops just enough to pull out the long-sleeved shirts and sweaters for my morning walk to the skytrain station, and the sky is a pale, cloudless blue that signals the end of the year. Christmas...
The first time I saw snow I was 26 years old and living 12,000 miles from the only tropical home I had ever known. It had been a strange winter in St. Louis, with two terrible ice storms that took down power lines and left hundreds of homes without electricity...
It was my last week in St. Louis, Missouri after having lived in the Midwestern city for a full year, and it was my last visit to my favorite place in the city—the Missouri Botanical Garden . The autumnal equinox had come and gone, but the weather stayed...