VALENTINE'S DAY IS just around the corner, which has me thinking warmly about things—and people—I love. But first, a brief history. Apparently, there was more than one Saint Valentine: Valentinus, from the Latin word for worthy, strong or powerful was a common name between the 2nd and 8th centuries A.D. The St. Valentine who [...]
I’VE BEEN BUSY WRITING production notes for the upcoming audiobook of The Walled Garden (so exciting!), so I haven’t had a lot of time to think about what to write here. It’s January in the Pacific Northwest and though the weather continues cold and raw, there are tiny signs that the garden is [...]
“THERE’S SOMETHING HYPNOTIC about the word tea,” says Lord Peter Wimsey, one of my all-time favorite fictional characters, in Dorothy L. Sayers’ incomparable 1935 novel, Gaudy Night. In my Welcome post, I wrote about how I fell in love with the taste of tea at a young age. Like a well-steeped cup, [...]
HERE WE ARE IN the middle of December already! Every year I try, with varying success, to find books with a Christmas theme to companion me through this busy and sometimes difficult season of decorating, shopping, and preparation. And before we get too far, I’d just like to say that if you [...]
It began with a bowl of beautiful reddish-gold plums and a question: are those damsons? The young woman behind the bar at one of my favorite places in the world, The Old Parsonage Hotel in Oxford, England, shrugged her shoulders and said she didn’t know. Why did I want to know about [...]