It's hard for me to believe, but my oldest son is old enough to be reading The Great Gatsby in English class. He knows it is my favorite book, and, since he is a most thoughtful human, he has been reading it out loud to me in the evenings. I have read Gatsby several times … Continue reading Freedom of the Neighborhood
Ms. Steinem and the Cable Girl
Gloria Steinem came to town this weekend. She is awesome. Her advocacy for equality among all genders, races and socioeconomic classes is inspiring. She is 85 years old, brilliant, calm and quick-witted. When she greeted the audience at Nashville's War Memorial Auditorium, only to realize that her microphone wasn't working, she quipped without skipping a … Continue reading Ms. Steinem and the Cable Girl
The Flowery Language of Construction
The Iris Tectorum are exquisite this spring. Lilac and lush, with flat, fan-shaped leaves and intricate petals worthy of orchids, Tectorum are more petite than the great bearded specimens of the Tennessee state flower. The blooms in my yard look like they have been plucked from a minor Van Gogh. I suspect their current flamboyance comes courtesy … Continue reading The Flowery Language of Construction
Class Notes: Dispatch from High School Reunion
When I worked briefly as a stock analyst (I know, right?), I regularly dialed in to conference calls to hear reports of quarterly earnings. Honestly, I never knew what the earnest voices were talking about with all their EBITDA, BLABLABLA and WTF, but when someone occasionally would say, "It's not the top-line number so much as the … Continue reading Class Notes: Dispatch from High School Reunion
SOME TERRIFIC RADIANT Fun at Cheekwood
Let me just say that starting a day at Cheekwood Estate & Gardens is a rare treat and privilege. For about the last month, I have weaseled my way onto the exquisite grounds early in the morning, before crowds arrive, to glimpse progress of Cheekwood's Storybook Houses exhibit, which opens to the public today. For … Continue reading SOME TERRIFIC RADIANT Fun at Cheekwood
Live: Chicken Feed
There is a baby Barred Rock chicken on my kitchen counter right now. She and her three sisters chirp incessantly while we cook nearby. The arrangement is by no means hygienic. But it's adorable. My middle son and I bought the birds at Tractor Supply Company a week before Easter. We set them up with … Continue reading Live: Chicken Feed
Wood and Flowers
This weekend, I lost myself in two favorite pastimes: woodworking and gardening. Both activities are a balm, lifting me out of whatever mental morass I'm stuck in and setting me in a flow, bordering on fixation. Time flies equally when I'm playing with a 20 V Max Lithium Ion cordless impact driver or a shovel. … Continue reading Wood and Flowers
A Little on the Trashy Side
When I was growing up in Nashville, there was an iconic anti-littering commercial featuring an unsavory motorist chucking garbage out of a jalopy and a song about "Tennessee Trash" playing in the background. In today's inclusive world, I don't suspect you could air a public service announcement equating a human to trash--even as double-entendre. Even … Continue reading A Little on the Trashy Side
Post Card from Paris
The last time I traveled to France, I was neither a mother nor a woodworker; I was a newlywed and a journalist. This spring, two decades after that honeymoon, I returned to Paris, where I realized that, as a middle-aged mom in construction, I view the world through a new lens. For example, looking at … Continue reading Post Card from Paris
Share a Few Words
Knowing that I spend a weird amount of time measuring things, my nephew Sean gave me a second-hand book for Christmas that contains just about every measurement conversion you can think of. Not just garden-variety inches-to-feet manipulations or polyglot Imperial-to-Metric translations. I'm talking 864 pages of small-print equations to calculate granular and arcane equivalencies. How … Continue reading Share a Few Words
Building Up Buttercup 