GROWING UP IN CEYLON

THE TEA SET For my sixteenth birthday, I received a beautiful tea set. I never owned anything so beautiful before. I don’t know how my parents could afford to buy it for me. Just one year later I had nothing else but the sugar bowl and the milk jug. I’m sure the set never was used. We lived in a house on the east bank of Sri Lanka’s longest river, the Mahaweli Ganga, at 1060 Peradeniya Road, Kandy. Each evening I called from the balcony facing the river, “Come and look at the sky! Come and look at the sky!” Whoever was at home rushed out to see what was going on. The ever-changing colors of the sunset expressed a beauty that no artist can capture. The wind blowing through bamboo groves by the river sang me to sleep each night. The numerous birds' chatter and whistling woke me each morning. There were numerous changes in my life throughout that year. What happened to the cups was just a culmination of everything else. Seven weeks after my birthday, just a ...

I Stand Amazed PRECIOUS MEMORIES     Welcome to join me in finding our story. Where does one begin a story? Once upon a time... There are numerous untold stories unfolding daily in each of our lives. Thanks to modern technology, I am finding old - and new friends - almost every week. It is hard for me to concentrate on a single line of my story.  Maybe I must write first to sort out the tangled threads of my life.  As I have lived around the globe, who knows what the final picture will be like. I welcome comments and reflections from my readers. I hope to add other blogs and posts as I go along. Just a few days ago I discovered a member of one family I knew 60 years ago in Ceylon. We never lived in the same town, but we met occasionally when we traveled with my father. Their two girls, a few years younger than me, sang beautifully. I envied their confidence, as I was terribly shy. I remember one tropical evening wh...