The New York Times Cultured Traveler

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An Artist, an Author and a Tree

Posted in aging, Art, Books, tagged D.H. Lawrence, Georgia O'Keeffe, The Lawrence Tree, The New York Times Cultured Traveler on June 13, 2026| Leave a Comment »

The Lawrence Tree by Georgia O’Keefe. It’s my new favorite painting by this artist.

“Trees are poems that the earth writes upon the sky.”– Kahlil Gabran

Aging My Way

I’ve long been an avid fan of Georgia O’Keefe’s art, and was thrilled when I visited her namesake museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. But I’ve never visited the D. H. Lawrence Ranch, just an hour and half away from the museum in Taos, where Georgia’s painting, The Lawrence Tree, hangs.

She and Lawrence were friends and the painting of the large Ponderosa Pine symbolizes the tree that the author sat beneath to write. I hadn’t even known such a painting existed until I read about it this morning in The New York Times Cultured Traveler: 100 Trips for Curious Minds from Agadir to Yogyakarta, a book that attracted my attention on a recent trip to the library.

But now, as a long-time tree hugger, The Lawrence Tree has become my favorite O’Keefe painting. The artist herself described it as: “a fitting and generous tribute to the author whose legacy she had become heir to.”

About the tree, which he sat beneath to write, Lawrence wrote: “The big pine tree in front of the house, still and unconcerned and alive…the overshadowing tree whose green top one never looks at… One goes out of the door and the tree-trunk is there, like a guardian angel.”

Lawrence must have felt the same love for his tree as I do about the tall Cottonwood – so out-of-place from its native home near some creek or river – that shades my one-bedroom apartment and small patio yard. So how could I not write about it.

Pat Bean is a retired award-winning journalist who lives in Tucson with her canine companion Scamp. She is an avid reader whose mind is always asking questions (many of which are unanswerable), an enthusiastic birder, staff writer for Story Circle Network’s Journal, author of Travels with Maggie available on Amazon (Free on Kindle Unlimited), and is always searching for life’s silver lining.

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Edna and Miami

Posted in aging, Books, Journeys, Writing, tagged Edna Buchanan, Florida, The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, The New York Times Cultured Traveler on June 1, 2026| Leave a Comment »

**In the 1980s, in Florida, everyone knew who Edna was. I didn’t live in Florida, but I knew. She was Edna Buchanan, a police reporter for the Miami Herald, and one of my role models.**

Aging My Way

On my weekly visit to the library, I picked up The New York Times Cultured Traveler: 100 Trips for the Curious Mind. It’s a classy anthology about a hundred places, from Agadir to Yogyakarta, that were featured in the newspaper’s travel section.

Reading about exotic and interesting places is high on my list of enjoyable things to do these days. While once that was to discover new and adventurous places to visit, these days it’s mostly only armchair travel — and an opportunity to recall memories of places I’ve visited during my lifetime.

The library book’s first section focused on the United States, so I had much to enjoy, like a story about Alaska’s Inside Passage, which I had experienced on a ferry ride from Haynes Junction to Vancouver in 1999.

But the book’s pages took me back even farther in time when I read an essay about Miami. While I had mostly bypassed the city to spend my time exploring the Everglades when I visited Florida, I had a connection to Miami that I had long forgotten. It was the note at the end of the article that suggested additional reading about the city that jolted my memory:

“The Corpse Had a Familiar Face by Edna Buchanan. Narrative of Miami’s dark side as seen by the Pulitzer Prize-winning crime reporter for the Miami Herald,” it read.

Edna was born in 1939, the same year as me, and she also wrote mystery novels, including a series featuring police reporter Britt Montero, that I had read. As a late-blooming and inexperienced reporter, Edna had been one of my role models. But I had completely forgotten all the newspaper stories and books I had read that she had written until her named popped up.

Gads, what else has my old-broad brain forgotten, was my first thought. I then went online and discovered Edna’s books were still in print, and I found and ordered a copy of The Corpse Had a Familiar Face. I can’t wait to see what other memories pop up when I reread it.

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