Farmer Gary and I have a tradition. Each evening, he asks me to look up how many readers visited this blog over the past day. It ranges greatly, depending on whether I’ve added a new post that day. Then comes the really good part. “Where are they from?” Blog analytics are fascinating. I haven’t splurged on a deep-dive system (yet), but the one I use lists readers by their nation. Gary never tires of it. Of course, the majority of…
Alright, so that’s not a direct quote from one of this month’s books, but it’s close. Six books this month, with so many more calling out to me from literally every room in the house. The year 2021 brought with it my first Folio Society (a British company, now employee-owned) purchases, to add to the 550 volumes we inherited from Dad and Mom. This year also included the delightful discovery of Your Brothers Bookstore, an independent shop in downtown Evansville….
Is there a term for a grandma who buys her LEGO-crazed grandson a set that she fully intends to keep, once built? (He will, of course, be welcome to visit it any time he likes.) I sprung the challenge on Cameron during our Thanksgiving get-together on Saturday. His response was almost poetic: Goose! If you buy it, I’ll build it! Within minutes, our Master Builder was hard at work, with his trusty sidekick, Papaw, at the ready. (Farmer Gary has…
A busy month, with our trip to Connecticut to clear out Mom & Dad’s house, but books managed to wave their pages as me, seeking to soothe my sore muscles and aching heart with an escape to wonderland. A side note: Farmer Gary puts me to shame when it comes to level of voracious reading. While in Connecticut, he kept a pile of newspaper circulars to read when he had a few minutes. We’d canceled Dad‘s newspaper and magazine subscriptions,…
Not long after Mom and Dad moved to Madison, Connecticut in 1995, they discovered a treasure. No, it wasn’t Hammonasset Beach State Park, just a few miles away. It wasn’t the many opportunities for fresh seafood in the charming oceanfront community. And it wasn’t even the discovery that there was a Girl Scout two doors down, who would keep them supplied with Thin Mints for years to come. It was the bookstore. And not just any bookstore. An independent bookseller….
Farmer Gary and I just returned from nine exhausting days in Madison, Connecticut. I’d volunteered us to sell Mom and Dad’s house, including clearing out the house of personal belongings. Spoiler Alert: Mission Accomplished. Gary and I felt comfortable taking on this task knowing that long-time friend Rus (a semi-retired realtor who grew up in Lowell, Mass., and is a roller-coaster enthusiast) would be at the ready with advice. Plus, my husband has a subscription to the Wall Street Journal,…
There’s something about May. Gentle breezes warm the air and all shades of green decorate trees, lawns, and fields. It’s no wonder Elizabethan dramatist Thomas Dekker wrote about “The Merry Month of May” in 1599. Side note: I learned from Farmer Gary the other day that the red dots in the field next to our house are Crimson Clover. From Capote to Coward, during May I tried to keep my book choices as merry as possible. Week 1: The Prime…
There are times when reading-to-learn ultimately teaches you how little you actually know. I now wonder if an entire year should be dedicated to focusing solely on my Irish books, rather than just the month of March. While that would no doubt lead to much laughter, it might also point me toward “the drink,” which I’ve managed to avoid thus far. The Irish have not had an easy go of it, that’s for sure. Week 1: Are You Somebody? by…
Farmer Gary is a renaissance man. His decades of planting and harvesting crops have taken him into the realms of botany, nutrition, chemistry, geology, meteorology. There’s math, engineering, economics, accounting, Even a bit of stand-up comedy. “Back when they were doing some digging work over at Mom’s home place, I noticed one of the bulldozers was a Japanese brand, so I asked the mechanic how he liked working on the equipment. He told me ‘the hardest part was learning to…
It’s National Hat Day, had you heard? Feels like a good excuse to pull together photos of family members and their fancy chapeaux from over the past 100 years. This first picture is of my great-grandfather Patrick Cassidy. He was a police officer, first in Belfast and then in New Haven, Connecticut. This photo is from around 1915. Here’s one of Patrick’s sons, Christy, looking snazzy: Another of Patrick’s four sons, Frank, was also a policeman. And my grandpa. Hopping…