LANGUAGE LESSONS It’s months now since I blogged about my constant companion, Brioche. Constant until I abandoned her for three weeks while I floated down the Rhine on a Viking river boat called TIALFI. We flew with her in a carrier so she could spend those weeks with my son and his family in South Carolina where she discovered that there is more to life than accompanying a lady of advanced years who is by nature sedentary, either reading a book or typing away on a computer, or playing the piano.When my daughter-in-law gave her a bath she dried her with the vacuum cleaner, a real first for Brioche! They tell me she waited at the front door for me to appear for the better part of the first couple of days, but after that my sense of it is that she reveled in this new lively household with four adults (two of them aged 16 and 18 but the two boys and their father measure six feet or close to it), two cats, both of whom outweighed her, and a very large very sweet Bernese Mo
SLOW, QUICK, QUICK: The Many Paths of Ballroom Dancers I haven’t blogged in a long time. In the past few months every time I went to the computer it was to work on a major project that I began back in 2015 and then set aside a couple of years later when I discovered Angela Macke’s amazing tea farm in Northern Michigan and a light went on in my head saying, “There’s a story here.” And then, realizing I already knew other wonderful women involved in different aspects of the food world in Norther Michigan, I said, “I think there’s a book here.” And there was. Northern Harvest: Twenty Michigan Women in Food and Farming was published in 2020, not the best time for promoting it since all the bookstore readings had to be cancelled, but nonetheless a book that found many positive reviews and I hope many happy readers. But before I got sidetracked into the wonderful oral histories of those twenty Michigan women I had begun the project of interviewing ballroom dancers, professionals a