Search Results for: Gretchen Hanson

Refresh Rewind: World Travelers

By The Refresh Editors  There is nothing like a good getaway. Whether you’re returning to a place that has significance for you or taking a voyage to a never-before-experienced-by-you destination, taking a trip can put you in a different state of mind and supply you with memories that last longer than that souvenir that will eventually get misplaced. We are constantly amazed by our writers and photographers at The Refresh, who chronicle their voyages around the globe and tell us…

Read More Read More

Life begins at 50, and age doesn’t define me

by Gretchen Hanson I have always hated my birthday. Not just hated, loathed, with a deep visceral anathema that is far more complicated than sheer vanity. And before you even ask, no, it is not obscenely old and I don’t look too much off what you would probably guess if you were being kind. I don’t hail from an age where a lady never said how old she was, or only appeared in the paper three times in her life….

Read More Read More

Charlottesville: a call to action for white women

by Gretchen Hanson I didn’t plan to be heading south towards Charlottesville, Virginia after the alt-right demonstration this past August. But I didn’t try to change my plans either. I am possessed simultaneously with contradictory personal gifts. I am a profound chaos magnet, but also the recipient of amazing travel karma. This has been manifested throughout my life by allowing me to be smack dab in the midst of the most dramatic political upheavals on the planet without ever being…

Read More Read More

Me Too

by Gretchen Hanson For many of us it started early, an insidious lesson we were taught so young it became a part of who we are. For me, it was my mother’s friend bathing me with too much attention to my private parts. Then it was my beloved uncle putting me to bed at night when I was six, touching first, later the private “games” I was to tell no one about.   Keep quiet, I was told, it’s our…

Read More Read More

Global Flavors: Mexico, My Mexico

by Gretchen Hanson The San Diego of my childhood was not the glossy high rises of the center city or the quaint architecture of the Gas Lamp District. It was a gritty border town of often unpaved roads, homes that were little more than adobe covered cement and mangy coyotes who ate your unwatched cats. In huge tracts of brush, immigrants without the protection of documentation were living hard. Bars were on every main street corner and often smelled of…

Read More Read More