Adventures in joyful living
Hello, everyone. Happy Friday, happy spring, happy Cinco de Mayo, happy Coronation weekend. Just letting you know that Bernadette of Bernadette’s New Classic Recipe graciously invited me to pen a post appropriate for Mother’s Day, which in the US is the second Sunday in May. I’ve written about my mother many times, but this one […]
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I’m a native of the state whose “tea party” spawned the American revolution, a second generation Italian-American firmly planted in US soil. If you’ve read my posts, you know how much being Italian means to me. Beyond my birthright, I’m a francophile and an anglophile. And in the latter capacity, I confess to being a […]
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Sounds a little like the title of an Anne Tyler novel, doesn’t it? Sometime in our pup’s second year, Hubby noticed that Enzo goes on high alert if he notices one or both of us at the vanity mirror, attending to the things that people do before they leave the house—Hubby shaving, me fussing with […]
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A few posts ago, I shared that I’d done a DNA test that yielded at least one expected result: I’m Southern Italian by an order of magnitude. But it also yielded close to 6,000 DNA matches from all over the place, from Rome to Canberra. The one result I’d really been after, a “proven” connection […]
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I was 12 when JFK won the US presidency and 15 when he was gunned down in Dallas in the first of a string of horrible political assassinations that occurred over the course of my adolescence and early adulthood. They were publicly shared, life-changing tragedies that set my generation on a hyper-idealistic quest to right […]
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I always knew this would happen. That’s why I put it off for so long. Nonetheless, I finally spit into that tiny tube and sent my DNA off into the ether. My father talked more about his family’s history than my mother did hers. I’ve always wondered if this had something to do with her […]
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We all needed a break… except, perhaps, Enzo, who cocked his head skeptically every time I said, “We’re going to the beach. Isn’t that grand?” Dogs, like old folks (“Not I” said the Little Red Hen), appreciate the reliability of routine. It was our first effort at making Enzo into a traveler. All our prior […]
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Sometimes you just need to get out of Dodge. For those of you who live on other shores, or haven’t grown up hearing it, that oh-so-American expression means Dodge City is a mess, and it’s time to move on. My research into its origins revealed that it did NOT originate in a black-and-white western—Gunsmoke is […]
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Those falling leaves…
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I’ve been a fan of those spiral-bound “community” cookbooks since I first started cooking. My interest, which admittedly has very little to do with cooking, dates to Mollie’s Cookbook, a mid-1970s fund-raiser for the Voluntary Action Center, an organization in Scranton PA that matched volunteers with charitable groups and institutions in need of help. The […]
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This first post of 2021 marks the fourth anniversary of my blogging adventure. My daughter originally suggested Hashtag Retired as a way to explore my transition to retirement. As I settled into a freer though still busy lifestyle, however, writing about retirement seemed less and less important to me. Retired or not, you are who […]
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Dear friends, before you read this, you should know that when I first started this post months ago, it was literally a fluffy little bit about the annoyances of successive household breakdowns. But when I came back to the post today, like a character in a novel under construction, it took me in an entirely […]
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Hashtag Retired 