Expatriots are generally young, bearded backpackers feeding their inner child and trying their hand at writing for as long as the dough from dad holds out . . . then going home to try and catch up with their graduating class.

I've run it the other way, retiring from 35 years of fairly honest work as a landscape architect to write . . . not to try my hand at writing, but to define my late-life as a writer. There isn't any doubt that living as an expat, outside the territorial limits of your country (and friends) and beyond the immediate consequences of its politics, allows one to see with different eyes. Perhaps more clearly, perhaps not.

Turning my collar against the familiar language in London and the absurd cost of Paris, I opted for Prague. Frozen for 50 years in the time capsule of communism, it is perhaps the last of the great old European cities redolent of empires long gone. And yet empire is in the cobbles of the streets and the ghost of Mozart treads the back halls of its opera houses . . .

• In the Melt
  We're in the melt here in the mountains of northern Bohemia, the roads running with small streams, the dog constantly muddy-pawed and it's a worthless exercise to wash the car
• Death, but for Chance
  It's almost too trite to say, but life is made up of and depends upon the slightness of chance.
• Not Speaking Czech
  I admit to having owned a pesky streak of arrogance my whole life long and this not speaking the language of my adopted country makes me uneasy because it is in some ways a resurgence of that darker side
• An Increasingly Isolated America
  It's a lonely and unsatisfactory life to be the toughest kid on the block and we as a nation have been that for the twelve years since the fall of communism
• Czech Society Looks at Itself Ten Years After Independence
  Life is lived moment by moment and this moment in Czech society, ten years after the fall of Communism is frozen, stagnated by the past and future
• Recollections of Last Night
  It's almost too trite to say, but life is made up of and depends upon the slightness of chance. On the other hand, triteness comes from the constancy of truths and so, we are stuck with it
• A Matter of Perception
  My Czech neighbor from downstairs was in for coffee just the other day. Among the many things we stumbled through in his halting English, because I still speak only phrases of his language, one comment stayed with me and I haven't been able to shake it
• Farmers are Farmers, In Poland or Peoria
  The small, family farm is just as much in doubt here in Eastern Europe as it is in America
• Europe or Eureka
  Why does the communist remnant feel so recognizable under my western sea legs?
• Walking the Dog
  We live right in the middle of Europe, in the Czech Republic about eighty miles straight north of Prague, in the mountains that are snugged up against Poland

Get out of the Archives and read what Jim's writing today