Short stories and photos shared with humor and love
We used to pick wild blackberries with our cousins, pool them and hand them off to our grandma, who baked them into the most amazing pies. I didn’t love blackberry picking — it’s hard, scratchy, slow, mosquito-swatting work. But, I did love my cousins and our grandma and the thick, sweet pies she fed us. [...]
NOTE: In honor of the 2025 NFL Draft being held at Lambeau Field, I am re-sharing some of my favorite posts about the draft. This one tells the story of my dad's experience. Due to the 26th Amendment, which changed the age of majority from 21 to 18, my Dad remains one of the only [...]
The pungent package arrived without a return address, but I knew exactly where it came from. Nick Asashon has been sending me miner's garlic every year since 2016, when he mailed me the first batch and connected me to Colver, Pennsylvania, a little mining town I used to love to visit, but haven't seen since [...]
Like everybody else, I will be very happy to say goodbye to 2020, when I went the whole year without seeing my immediate family all together under one roof, even for a night; and watched people I love struggle to rebalance their relationships on solid, common ground in a brutally divisive climate; and worried every [...]
The first time my husband Vince visited Sisti's Tavern in Colver, PA he came home sweating Jim Beam. We were seniors in college then, and I had brought him east to meet my grandparents, the formidable Jay and Micky Kostelnik. They greeted us from their front porch and fed us an enormous meal of veal [...]