Adventures in joyful living
For all but a few of the last 20 or so years, I have faithfully used the same recipe for Easter bread, from my beloved Roseto Cookbook,* Anna Marie Ruggiero’s culinary homage to the life and times of the Italian immigrants, their children, and their children’s children, in a tiny town in the Slate Belt […]
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I fell in love with New England—technically, my native New England—not on those tedious trips north from Pennsylvania when I was a tiny child, but month by month, on the pages of Yankee magazine. I’ve mentioned before that my father, a first generation Italian-American, grew up in a papermill town in Western Maine. Think Richard […]
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There is chaos in this house. While to a degree it is organized chaos, it is chaos nonetheless. When we moved into our newly built, suitably downsized home nearly five years ago, I naively thought we were done with home improvement projects and the chaos they impose. Fat chance. Here I sit, with the […]
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No, not Austen. And not Jane. But they have books and writing in common. It was a verdant Central Pennsylvania summer, and I was in my last term, anxious for graduation. Summer terms were rapid-fire in those days, eight weeks as opposed to the usual ten. Classes met four times a week and, as I […]
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I hit the ground running early this morning when inspiration struck. Move the love seat from the den back to the living room, and move the wingback to the den. There is nothing unusual about this urge, as most women know. When the kids were itty bitty, I was always moving furniture around. In those […]
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Whereas buying a book now and then requires minimal space—I can always accommodate another book on my nightstand or the coffee table if need be—the haul from the thrice yearly book sales is another matter. To be sure that I have sufficient space for half a dozen or so treasures, I’ve adopted the ritual of […]
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Yesterday I found myself cleaning out what I referred to in one of my early posts as “the graveyard under the sink”—that Netherland in the vanity where all of the once-tried and subsequently rejected hair care products, body lotions, nail polish, and so forth find their home. I purge the vanity every three months or […]
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Continuing an earlier theme that amounts, basically, to “sunshine on a cloudy day,” on this snowy afternoon I invite you to enjoy a petit gout of Carolina blue… North Carolina’s signature blue sky. We had a house in North Carolina for a very short time, in an almost too well planned community between Chapel […]
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I teared up, almost as if I’d lost a friend, when I saw that Peter Mayle had passed. After all, he had given me Provence—first on the printed pages of his charming, insightful trilogy—A Year in Provence, Encore Provence, Toujours Provence—and thereafter the engaging, lighthearted novels he set there, irresistible confections all. Hotel Pastis and […]
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January is that metaphorical new broom that sweeps clean. I like to start out the new year re-establishing routines, tackling those niggling little tasks that typically fall by the wayside, and trying to get back to my happy places, chief among them my reading time. After what I like to refer to as my “medical […]
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This morning, our low here broke a 100-year record. Thus, I’ve decided that my blogging anniversary week will be dedicated simply to — in the immortal words of the Temptations — “…sunshine on a cloudy day.” This particular sunny light is Italian… in Monterosso al Mare, in the Cinque Terre.
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It’s crazy cold here. Despite my respect for the change of seasons, and the fact that we’d danced in the streets at the Carnaval de Québec when the “real feel” was -30, I’ve since grown unaccustomed to day after day of temps in the teens and below. Thus, these enticing glimpses of Greater Miami are […]
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Hashtag Retired 