No one but me thought it was a good idea to hire a live-in maid and nanny. My mother reminded me that she had raised three kids and worked full time, and still managed to keep a cleaner house than mine, all on her own. My mother-in-law pointed out that neither of my sisters-in-law had maids, and they could actually afford…
I need a single bowl of tomatoes for dinner, but the plant is overflowing with the delicate orange orbs. It’s the end of an extravagantly fertile summer that began with a slow spring and plentiful rain, a rarity for our high desert climate. My garden has responded to the weather, heavy with produce. As I…
In junior high I made a tornado machine. For the science fair, I was determined to do something showstopping, something smashing. No clay-made volcano of baking soda and vinegar explosions would suffice. Our summers growing up were often spent driving to and from Minnesota so my mother could help on the farm. I assumed in…
YOU WONDER WHY I TAKE BATHS ALL THE TIME Ten p.m. He would be home in about an hour. She jumped up and turned off the television. Nothing romantic about having the television on, especially at eleven o’clock. He’d come in, tired from working the night shift, pushing the door shut so he could put his coat…
Yesterday a homespun miracle happened: I cut our first artichoke. Artichoke plants take three years to bear fruit and the starts I put in the ground last April weren’t in good shape by this spring. One had died and the other was slug-eaten and sad looking. Another year, I told myself. If it lives. But…
When my husband Matt and I first bought this hundred-year-old farmhouse, we were astounded by the gift of it. In this seaside town north of Seattle, townhouses with postage stamp footprints are being built down the street in both directions, but this old homestead parceled off its farmland to suburban expansion and stopped with a third…
If there’s something my Italian heritage has taught me, it’s that food brings people together. Not just to eat it. Making pasta is a family assembly line, taking an entire day of talking and drinking wine while hands busily fold and seal tortellini. You make lots and you invite the neighbors. Food is tradition and hospitality, love and gift, shared enterprise and social do.
Kindred 