Sabrina Lloyd

I love memoirs. As I live this crazy life, as I ride the bumps, take the sharp curves, marvel at the beauty, weather the hardships, as I cry and laugh and pause, I wonder and wonder how we all do it, how other people do it, what their triumphs and weaknesses look like. People’s stories I want to devour. I am the woman who finds it a great joy to sit at the foot of an elderly person and become the well that they pour their memories into. Tell me more, tell me more, tell me mor

Dear Spring, I am going need to you to try a little harder. It was a very long, dark winter and while I appreciate your tenderness, I need you to assert yourself now, please. Okay, yes, I did complain about your early arrival last year with a sun that blazed and scorched a bit too soon, so let me apologize. I am sorry. I will never complain if you coming rolling in like a jet again, because this snail pace is just really getting me down. Yesterday my fingers lost feeling in t

My son and I found this piece of bark on one of our long beach walks. It is completely whole, round, having fallen off and come apart from a tree without breaking. I imagine the log tossed in waves, smashed against rocks, water massaging and tearing at the bark little by little until it unhinged itself and floated back to shore. I’ve been thinking a good deal about memories now that the time for our next move is coming nearer and nearer. How we always have to start over, rein

Who am I? Who are you? Who are we? A dearest of my heart, a dear dear friend who knows all of my secrets (shhhhhh) told me today I seem so strong in these posts. Am I this strong woman on the mountainside? Am I the scared woman under the bed in Uganda? I am all of that. I am all of this. I am all of me. I am the woman you see at the store with a smile on her face and a longing in her heart. I am the child with a dream to make it somewhere, somehow, some way. I am the mother h

Uganda was familiar yet so much had changed. It still remains running in my blood, when I look at my daughter I am there, she wraps the county around me so I can still smell it and feel it, even long for it. I see in her the people I knew for 4 years, the people on the street, in the shops, walking along the road. I see them all when I look at her. And miss them. How lucky I am to have lived in the country my daughter is from for 4 years. To know that part of her. The city is

Summer is here. Storms hang in corners; windows are now perpetually open, as mosquitoes rest on my pillow waiting for me to sleep so that they can have their feast. I thought we’d left bed nets behind in Uganda, but this past week we found ourselves hanging them above and around our bed in Rome, so that once again night holds us in webs. Construction is also in flower, and every corner and every window barrages the world around it with hammering and drilling, which pound and

Just a 45 minute drive from Rome, you can climb up into the sky. Below you are cherry trees, olive trees, and apple trees, that you can stop and pick from along the way. As we drove back to the city, smog and noise welcoming us at the gate, it took all we had to not turn around and go back. We live in cities for work, for opportunity, connection, but I am starting to think it’s not worth losing the stars. I asked my husband last night if the next stop can be right under them.

The world is small. This past weekend, while out for a walk with my amazing family, I watched my past crossing the street, coming right towards me. Where I could have been startled, I felt oddly peaceful, as if this were exactly how life was supposed to go: the people we know randomly appearing throughout it. Here was a dear friend, from my early days in New York, one that I had not spent time with in over a decade, suddenly standing before me on the streets of Rome.  Here to

I feel the pull. I think it started with a picture. Or maybe it was just a word. But the roots I felt were slipping, slowly untangling and shredding have found a concrete barrier and tug me back towards them. I don’t need much. Just a fix. Just to know it’s still there while we jump from place to place, circling the sphere like balloons. I wonder where our daughter will find hers. Somewhere we happen, when suddenly she starts to grow downward, into the land itself. I was born

We’ve had a good deal of visitors here in Rome. At first, I enjoyed being a tour guide, but after my eighth trip to the Colosseum I started to feel like I’d rather pull my hair out than climb those steps again. But then something interesting happened. I learned that if you see something through someone else’s eyes, you will see it for the first time, every time. When I took my husband’s parents to the Pantheon recently (my favorite ruin), they both showed me something I had n

Kampala, Uganda I remember once when my husband (then boyfriend), who had just come back from Kenya, sat listening to me patiently in NY as I went on and on about my problems. Oh, I don’t even remember what I was upset about. I am sure I didn’t get a job I really wanted, or a neighbor was being too noisy, or a friend and I had a horrible falling out, or perhaps I’d been sick and run down. He smiled at me and I asked him if he thought my problems were meaningless. This how he

Strange Easter. We had decided to spend it up north in an old monastery outside of Orvieto. Being an ex-pat, the holidays are more challenging. There isn’t a well-worn back yard for games and hunts, nor a comfy old den with closets full of decorations that only need a dusting and reason. No family to stop by with cakes and laughter or friends to visit with beer in hand. It’s just us three, trying to carve out our own traditions so that our child has some known footprints to f

At the end of work on the first film I did, my sweet young co-star gave me a small glass bird, the bluebird of happiness. It became a symbol for me for the next 20 years. No matter where I moved, what hardships occurred, that bluebird was a reminder that someone and something had given me happiness. In our first month of living in Uganda the girl who was working for us broke my bluebird, shattering it into pieces. Here I was, away from all I knew, the identity I had created f