Strawberry Fields Forever

Posted July 3, 2015

I’m on VACATION so….posting slipped my mind last night. HOWEVER, today, tomorrow, or whenever possible, I want to encourage you, dear reader, to make some fresh jam (it’s strawberry season in VT, so that’s what is cooking on our stove). Simply stated: Life is so much better with jam. So much, trust me! xxoo

Nine Cent Girl

Vermont is “Pick Your Own” territory: from summer berries to fall apples we have the opportunity to visit farms and orchards to handpick any number of fruit, much of it organic.

Despite a very wet June the strawberry crop at River Berry Farm was coming beautifully, although later than typical. In between the rain storms rolling through our valley I had a fortuitous and dry hour-long window to pick six quarts of ripe and wonderfully sweet strawberries.

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for all of us

Posted June 25, 2015

Filed under Writing

Last week while still in Louisville I had the good fortune to hear Richard Blanco retell his story: from immigrant to inaugural poet for Obama in 2013. The story he shared is fabulous, filled with colorful elaboration, detailing his parents’ bold move from Cuba to Miami, recalling his fascinating childhood to his own journey as a poet. He moved his audience to tears and laughter, from the nostalgia of the past to the shared hope for the future. His story touched us all as pieces of it became our own. How he was picked by the White House is a mystery, even to him, but once we all heard his voice ring out over the capital on that cold January day, that no longer mattered. Richard Blanco is all of us.

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“look up and out” #again

Posted June 18, 2015

Filed under Life

I’ve just returned from scoring AP English Literature exams, 1400 of them to be exact, and I will not pretend to have much of a brain left to blog. But besides that reality, this post, which I wrote a few years ago, speaks of my experience then, and is echoed just as vividly now. There are multiple worlds that collide while I am in Louisville: the privileged AP students whose essays I am reading and the homeless camping about the city. I have no answers to our national questions of poverty and race and inequality, only these brief personal reflections, only this re-post from 2012 in which to decipher my myriad of emotions. I thank you old-time Nine Cent Girl fans for re-reading. I hope to be back on solid ground next week.