JUMP AT THE SUNS

It’s perfectly fine to have great expectations of New Orleans. Its various institutions are well-versed in the onus that is placed on the city to hold space for the past and present to co-exist simultaneously and the swirl of nostalgic emotions that consort it. What’s new, is only as good as the reverence it pays to historical relics and people. Especially, the latter. Consider this: During the Jazz Age, the headquarters of the New Orleans Public Service – or NOPSI – was a ce

I grew up between parched Southern Cali suburbs and maternal and paternal immediate and extended family in Jamaica. I was exposed to rural/city dynamic from early on. Even in Jamaica, the stratification was apparent: my maternal grandparents set roots in the bush of central Jamaica in ostensibly the poorest of conditions -- no running water, outdoor toilets and baths -- but with a wealth of resources to flourish and generate. My grandfather, a farmer, worked the land/his farm

"Oh, let's go back to the start." We are, and have always been, on African time. The practice of mourning infused with the celebration of life is a divinely African notion experienced throughout the Diaspora. Consider the sometimes months-long tradition in Luoland, Kenya, for example, called 'tero buru', a ceremony that tends to both the deceased and the bereaved; bridging the distance -- if only temporarily -- between this world and that of the ancestors. It's essentially ab

They call Santa Fe the “Sky City” because – besides being at 7,000-foot altitude — you are constantly compelled to look up. You see a glimpse of this in “Buck and the Preacher” starring Sidney Poitier and Harry Belafonte depicting the westward expansion by then-post-Civil War migrants and homesteaders who ventured by the thousands from Louisiana to Colorado via the jagged, seemingly indifferent and unrelenting expanse of New Mexico where sky and earth meet. Another reference,

There are some travels that change you. Some change the way you measure time, space, even distance. Others recalibrate your senses, birthing new essentials, and normals. Sometimes, these alterations happen in ways you don’t realize until long after, mostly upon reflection or recollection. But if you’re lucky, the significance and transformation is revealed in real time. And then it lingers and haunts. I should have known that St. Barth would insist on it. Called Ouanalao by i

It was like something out of Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, “Their Eyes Were Watching God.” The part where Janie and Tea Cake go out to work in the muck of the Florida Everglades while the Seminoles and other migrant workers — taking heed to the impeding hurricane, headed north to higher ground. I imagine Tallahassee might have been one of those places. The weekend I drove roughly five hours from Atlanta down to Tallahassee found most of Florida and Georgia’s east coasts and out

My mother’s family hails from Bois Content, Jamaica in the hills north of Old Harbour Bay, on the South Coast of the island. My father lives in Linstead – of “Linstead Market” fame – an outlying lowland suburb, of sorts, to Kingston. My own house in the “land of wood and water” is 1.5 miles up a winding incline in the Prospect hamlet of the St. Mary parish, on the north coast. Jamaica is home. If you keep driving east along the coastline, you’ll soon bend the curves of the li

There’s little to nothing on the 30-minute drive from the airport to Costa Rica’s Papagayo peninsula to which the Pacific Ocean lays claim. Nothing – as in no busy town squares or bustling markets or other city dweller comforts. Instead there are sugar cane fields and green pastures for miles on either side of the road with errant broods of cattle or horses to break up the vast expanse. The Guanacaste region is unsullied and unspoiled. In the distance, under a ring of mist –

Great wine grapes, it is said, need sun to aid in the production of sugars (via photosynthesis), color development and heat accumulation for overall ripening. The amount of afternoon sun it receives combined with elevation and proximity to damp soil and arid air all determine a wine’s acidity, sweetness, tannin, body and other flavor components. Over a creamy lobster dish that married well with Antica 2013 Chardonnay, the Antinori family’s buttery white from Foss Valley, I wa