An Italian-American Writer & Poet with a Yankee Outsider Perspective
When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, she imagined a neighborhood so quiet as to be dead. All the birds gone due to DDT’s effect on thinning their shells and killing the worms and insects they ate. Today we … Continued
Three thousand miles up, I’m sometimes at a loss for things to do. Recently, flying home from Italy via Amsterdam, I started reading the KLM packaging. Not only did the flight magazine tell me that Amsterdam’s Concertgewau orchestra hall is … Continued
Cooking by instinct didn’t happen overnight. In fact, in that first tiny kitchen, New York City circa 1965, I’m not even sure I could hardboil an egg. But I knew what, among my mother’s rather bland fare, I could taste … Continued
First or second go-around farmers in Minnesota grew a little bit of everything from chickens and turkeys to beef and dairy cows to wheat, corn, flax, rye, and the numerous tiny crops of their summer kitchen gardens. When I visit … Continued
In Minnesota Scandinavia, the Danes figure, along with their more populous cousins the Swedes and the Norwegians, as contributors of delectable (and hard to make) holiday treats; civic accountability; spare, appealing furniture design; and the Danish Gymnasts. Friends took me … Continued
Food and the countryside–two topics my Italian friends never tire of discussing. I think of their food fascination as “lingua” which means tongue as well as language, or as in the name of a nice family-run restaurant on the other … 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