An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
My mother was the most passionate traveler I’ve ever met. Possibly because during childhood and college, she rarely went far from the small North Dakota farming town where her father, as she used to say, was “the big fish in … Continued
It’s rained overnight and the air is fresh. Up early the cardinals chip-chip as they come to the feeders. The most beautiful of the backyard birds, yet the most shy, they arrive in the twilight hours, as if wanting to … Continued
Arrival doesn’t begin to describe what happened. For almost a year, Gelsey and I had searched for colleges. We traveled east–where our families lived–and visited six (or was it seven?) campuses in a week. From Middlebury, Vermont–stately trees, huge rocks, … Continued
It’s a “Misty Moisty Morning of real Chicago weather,” my mother used to recite, except we weren’t in Chicago but Charleston, South Carolina, and my mother, the Midwesterner, couldn’t help herself. Midwestern weather and geography overlay her view of our … Continued
Margotlog: Mother/Daughter Food Fights:Tension over food: there’s the pout, the hands on hips, the storming from the table, the “You can’t run my life.” Why do mothers and daughters pitch their battles over the plate? I know: it dissipates with … Continued
MotherLode, MommyLore, MamaLog Years ago when I was pregnant with my daughter, my mother took her first solo trip “aboad.” There I sat stewing in Minnesota while she flitted along the Rhine, across the Alps into Italy and back to … Continued