everybody loves a parade Our house is a jumble of boxes, papers are everywhere, artwork has come down and rests against walls, laundry is piled high. The fridge and pantry are empty mainly, and shall stay that way at this point. I've spent hours on the phone and online doing the things one does, cancelling … Continue reading This Is How a New Chapter Begins
Transitions
Birthday Week 2021
Happy birthday to us Another year's in the books for Chef David and for me. Here we are, smack in the middle of birthday week, and smack in the middle of scrubbing, sorting, pitching, and packing ahead of Reboot.2, this time the two of us plus one bewildered doggie. It'll be okay, we think. We've … Continue reading Birthday Week 2021
Farewell to Thee, Dear Clapboard New Englander
There you stood in your pale green frock with white trim, showing a little age but resolute and desirable still, ready for come what may. You embraced us when we walked inside, asked where we’d been, and so we knew we were yours. We massaged your muscles and traced the contours in your bones with … Continue reading Farewell to Thee, Dear Clapboard New Englander
Travel Story: Wilmington, NC at the Solstice
summer solstice 2021, Wrightsville Beach The Chef and I are home one week now after our exploratory trip down in Wilmington, North Carolina, where we'll soon count ourselves as residents among the local population. David had some promising interviews and we managed to find a place to live, a gigantic list item ticked. These images … Continue reading Travel Story: Wilmington, NC at the Solstice
House Plans: Carolina Dreamin’
The Stuff of Dreams; New York Public Library Digital Collections I swear, I am so sick of myself. Must be the pandemic-induced isolation…anybody out there feel the same? Lately I’ve tried to take this, what? torpor, I suppose, and redirect it into designing our North Carolina home, in my head at least. The Chef bought … Continue reading House Plans: Carolina Dreamin’
Surviving a Pandemic: Got a Plan B?
Knoxville Ballet School In 2006 I launched Knoxville Ballet School with the goal of bringing classical instruction in its purest form to a city of roughly a half million—unrelenting quality in that singular discipline, and nothing else, would be the thing to distinguish what I was peddling from what other schools in the area offered, … Continue reading Surviving a Pandemic: Got a Plan B?
A Reflection: Finding Grace in Solitude
You may be by yourself, but you’re not alone. I couldn’t have foreseen sitting outside in our lovely outdoor space on the first warm, sunny spring day in Vermont while our world suffers through a pandemic, but here we are. Yesterday The Chef pulled all the outside furniture out of winter storage, brushed off the … Continue reading A Reflection: Finding Grace in Solitude
Sunday Photo Essay: Butternut Squash Soup
It's the time of year I start yearning for soup and chili, feel the need to stand in my kitchen and create things. Tomorrow is the first day of fall, and I shall greet it with the best possible outlook, knowing it will also hand us our first plowable snow, and keenly aware our first … Continue reading Sunday Photo Essay: Butternut Squash Soup
A Memory: Living Like the One Percent
The main condition for the design, we said to the contractor standing in our Knoxville back yard 15 years ago, is for the pool to look like it’s been here since the house was built, in 1926. Yes, he said, he thought he could do that. No vast expanse of boring white concrete pool deck, … Continue reading A Memory: Living Like the One Percent
A Christmas Story: Holidays Are Hard
A few days ago something or other I saw on the telly prompted me to hop onto the web and find out who’s living in my erstwhile home in Tennessee now—whether it’s the same people who bought it at auction in 2012, mere moments before the bank would’ve foreclosed on it, as it turns out. … Continue reading A Christmas Story: Holidays Are Hard
Sycamore Stories 