When in France… – Hashtag Retired

by Angela

‘St. Martin’s summer’

What have I been up to in the last few weeks? Enjoying long walks under gorgeous October skies, reading (Elizabeth George’s A Great Deliverance and Louise Penny’s All the Devils Are Here — they are truly “sisters in crime”), baking a bit (more on that in a subsequent post), binging the magnificent series Shetland on […]

by Angela

Martha Pearl to the rescue

When I volunteer to “bring something,” my contribution is invariably an “old chestnut” whose outcome is never subject to question. For July 4th, a chocolate cake seemed the logical all-American choice. Given a miserable heat wave and the three loads of wash in progress, you’d think I would simply have thrown together my go-to, never […]

by Angela

Au revoir, Monsieur Mayle

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 […]

by Angela

January reads

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 […]

by Angela

Garden bounty

I haven’t had a full-blown vegetable garden since the early 80s; but up until that point, the gardens I planted and tended were fairly successful—healthy and productive and free of all the bad stuff. I’ve missed gardening over the years, but I gradually learned to accept the fact that I couldn’t do everything, all of […]

by Angela

Oscar, mother, and those jelly jars

I’ve loved The Importance of Being Earnest, one of dear Oscar Wilde’s funniest, since we staged the show in high school. Many of its epigrammatic quips have stayed with me all these years. It’s possible that I like this one best: All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does. That’s his. […]

by Angela

Roussillon

As we hover between the last gasp of winter and the earliest days of spring, take a moment to visit Roussillon with me. Roussillon rises out of the Vaucluse like a Provençal Brigadoon. The ochre-laden earth gives it a sunny luminescence even on the grayest day. Roussillon is one of the villages perchés of Provence—the perched villages […]

by Angela

‘Le weekend’

By the time we get to Friday, even those of us who are #HashTagRetired are ready for the promise of relief that the weekend affords. “Weekend” is a word so emblematic that the French, who used to be very zealous about protecting their language from outside influence, gave it a gender and added it to their franglais vocabulary. Le […]